Why scientists want your photos of wildlife eating lunch
The food chain you learned about in school isnât the full picture. Yes, the rat eats your garden crops, the ermine snags the rat, and the eagle picks off the ermine. But that linear story misses a whole lot of nuance. Parasites like ticks and intestinal worms feed on the eagle and ermine. When those predators die, ants and other scavengers devour their carcasses. Oh, and rats are known , so theyâre predators of themselves.
Capturing the extraordinary complexity of species interactions has been a time-honored â and time-consuming â process of scientists getting out in the field and spying on birdsâ nests, for instance, to see what the parents feed their young. Less romantically, theyâve had to sift through scat for the bones of prey animals.Â
Now theyâve got an even more powerful â and far less smelly â tool in the form of a citizen science project called . It taps into the nonprofit social network iNaturalist, which identifies species in photos that people upload and geotag. You can search for âbrown rat,â for example, and find  near Monty Drive in Ottawa, Canada. If thatâs not metal enough for you, search for âred-tailed hawkâ to see the raptors laying waste to snakes and squirrels all across the United States.
Who Eats Whom isnât just engrossing â it could help inform conservation efforts on a rapidly warming planet, Â reports. So far, itâs incorporated 17,000 interactions involving 5,700 species in more than 100 countries. âThatâs just kind of the power of crowdsourcing,â said ecologist Bradley Allf, who developed the platform while at North Carolina State University but is now at Colorado State University. âYou can generate a ton of valuable information in a way that you canât if youâre just an individual scientist trying to follow snakes around and hope they eat something while youâre watching them, or waiting for them to poop and be able to take their scat.â
While the database literally offers snapshots in time, the idea is to amass data over the coming years, revealing how ecosystems are transforming alongside the planet as a whole. âEven if we look back, say, five years ago, there have been a lot of changes in the feeding patterns of these animals,â said Aditi Mallavarapu, a computer scientist at North Carolina State University and co-author of a new  describing the work in the journal PLOS Biology. âSo not only looking at what is being observed, but also noticing what is not being observed.â
Who Eats Whom, then, is more than a repository of captivating photos. If you click on âInteractive Food Webâ at the top right of the site, it brings up a sprawling web of interactions. Search again for âred-tailed hawkâ and youâll see a plethora of small mammals that people have photographed them predating. (Arrows pointing to a species indicate the food going into it.) Look even closer and youâll find that one of its meals, the American robin, eats the common buckthorn and yaupon holly.Â
And letâs not forget the pollinators. Search for âWestern honey beeâ in the interactive food web and youâll see that it â among many other insects â , an absolutely gorgeous, ghostly white arachnid. But notice also all the plants that the bee feeds on â honeysuckles, thistles, buttercups â and helps reproduce by spreading their pollen around. âThereâs all kinds of complicated ways that energy moves through real food webs, and weâre trying to document that messiness as much as we can,â said Allf, who is also the lead author of the new paper.
Who Eats Whom offers plenty of surprises. People have snapped New World vultures dining on all manner of carcasses, from wild boars to raccoons to groundhogs. On a beach in Californiaâs San Luis Obispo County, though, at least one of the birds , which had likely been stillborn.
With so many smartphone-wielding folks wandering beaches and forests and deserts, ecologists have gained an army of invaluable allies. âThe biggest challenge is really data acquisition, because thereâs so many species and so many interactions out there,â said Peter Roopnarine, curator of invertebrate zoology and geology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasnât involved in the project. âThey sometimes can be ephemeral â like it happens once in a lifetime of a species, and thatâs it. And theyâre dispersed all over the place.âÂ
By better understanding who eats whom, scientists and conservationists can better protect species. As the planet rapidly heats, species are marching toward the relative coolness of the poles. This is reshuffling ecosystems and changing how species interact. With a platform like Who Eats Whom, normal people with smartphone cameras may well be the first to document the arrival of a new animal in their area. âItâs obviously super engaging, I think, for the people who are participating,â said Rebecca Johnson, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasnât involved in the project. âIt gives you a new way of thinking about your nature observations that you might share.â
At the same time, invasive species â most notoriously, Â â are shaking up ecosystems the world over. Left unchecked, hungry invaders can decimate native species, which may already be weakened by skyrocketing temperatures and worsening droughts. âWe need to know whoâs being consumed by these invasive species,â Roopnarine said, âand are there species on that menu that we really need to be worried about?â
To properly protect species in this topsy-turvy world, conservationists canât just set aside some land or sea and call it a victory. They also need to ensure that carnivores and omnivores have the prey they usually hunt, and herbivores have the plants they usually graze. âSpecies donât just need space â they donât just need a habitat,â Allf said. âThey need the relationships that allow them to survive.â
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