Niche

Ecological Niche

• The place or function of a given organism within its ecosystem.

Ecosystem

• a system, or a group of interconnected elements, formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment.

Vultures in Trouble

When a species experiences catastrophic population declines as high as 99.9 percent, any bit of good news is cause for celebration—even if the news isn't exactly great. India’s vultures now have some.

The birds were almost completely wiped out by a veterinary drug called diclofenac, but a new study finds that the number of deaths have declined by nearly two thirds since 2006. Unfortunately, the study confirms what we already knew: Despite the fact that diclofenac was banned in India in 2006 it remains heavily used, as does another drug, ketoprofen, one of several treatments that were brought in to replace diclofenac.

Both drugs treat diseases in livestock, such as cattle (which are raised for milk but not eaten in Hindu culture), but they are fatal to vultures. When the birds eat carcasses of animals treated with the drugs, they experience kidney failure and die within days. India’s introduction of diclofenac in the 1990s proved deadly to the country's vultures. One species, the Indian white-rumped vulture, declined by 99.9 percent. The Indian vulture and slender-billed vulture experienced similar declines. All three species were classified as critically endangered in 2000.

The loss of the vultures had a domino effect. Without the scavengers to eat fallen cows the number of wild dogs increased, as did incidents of human disease. One religion, Zoroastrianism, whose members leave their dead for the vultures, also had to build $5-million worth of vulture aviaries to maintain their tradition.

The good news arrived in a study published October 13 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. It says the ban has started to do some good. Researchers from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and other institutions studied vultures and fallen cattle carcasses from 2006 to 2010. In 2009 alone the number of carcasses of cattle treated with diclofenac had dropped by 49 percent. Based on this new information the researchers concluded that, based on vulture feeding behaviors, diclofenac-related vulture deaths had declined by 65 percent.

Of course, with the populations of all three species already devastated, 65 percent doesn't add up to all that much, but it is a step in the right direction.

Vultures

There are two types of vultures that can be found in and around the Colonel Campus. They are the Turkey Vulture and the Black Vulture.

They have differences that make them distinctive based on their appearance and their behavior.

Questions to Ponder

What is the Vulture's niche?

What might happen if the vulture population started declining?

Scientific Observation

Driving Question:

• To what extent are turkey and black vultures present at the CRMS campus?

Activity

• Collect data on numbers of the different kinds of vultures that are present at the CRMS campus.