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Zach Olson, Ph.D., assistant professor of Animal Behavior in the Department of Psychology, recently published a paper in PLoS ONE.

The paper, titled “Carcass Type Affects Local Scavenger Guilds More than Habitat Connectivity,” discusses the behaviors of scavengers and decomposers. Olson and his coauthors found that not all scavengers feed on available carcasses, thus contradicting the notion that carcasses represent a free meal.

Olson and his coauthors also observed that “removal of a carcass, an important ecosystem service provided by scavengers, depends on the number of vertebrate species that assemble to feed on a carcass. This finding, they wrote, “suggests that efforts to protect biodiversity may have the practical value of reducing disease transmission on the landscape.”