The world’s largest carnivores are declining and now occupy mere fractions of their historical ranges. Theory predicts that when apex predators disappear, large herbivores should become less fearful, occupy new habitats, and modify those habitats by eating new food plants. Yet experimental support for this prediction has been difficult to obtain in large-mammal systems. Following the extirpation of leopards and African wild dogs from Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, forest-dwelling antelopes (bushbuck, Tragelaphus sylvaticus) expanded into treeless floodplains, where they consumed novel diets and suppressed a common food plant (waterwort, Bergia mossambicensis). By experimentally simulating predation risk, we demonstrate that this behavior was reversible. Thus, whereas anthropogenic predator extinction disrupted a trophic cascade by enabling rapid differentiation of prey behavior, carnivore restoration may just as rapidly reestablish that cascade.
README_Metadata for Atkins et al. data files
Metadata description for all data files - please read before viewing each file.
Raw_GPS_all_bushbuck_2016
Raw, unannotated GPS data from 12 bushbuck collared in August-September 2016 in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique.
Raw_GPS_all_bushbuck_2015
Raw, unannotated GPS data from 11 bushbuck that were collared in 2015 in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique
2015_Bushbuck_annotated_GPS_data_Figure1C_E
Annotated GPS data from 11 bushbuck collared in 2015 in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Used to create Figures 1C and E in the paper.
2016_Bushbuck_map_data_FigureS1
Filtered and annotated GPS data from 12 bushbuck collared in 2016 in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Used to create Figure S1 in the Supplementary Materials.
Bushbuck_woodland_floodplain_densities
Densities of floodplain and woodland bushbuck from aerial count data collected in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique, between 2002 and 2016.
2016_Bushbuck_annotated_GPS_data_experimental_response_variables
Filtered and annotated GPS data from 12 bushbuck collared in 2016 Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. This file contains the relevant data from the predator simulation experiments - nighttime locations, 48 hours before and 48 hours after both predator and procedural control cue deployment, for each individual.
Bushbuck_Diet_GNP2016_trnL_filtered_data
Metadata_fecal samples_bushbuck_GNP2016
Diet_quality_data_DE_DP
The diet quality data for 11 woodland and 7 floodplain bushbuck calculated from fecal samples collected in July - August 2016.
Top_10_diet_plants_DP_DE
The nutritional quality data for some of the top 10 diet plant species for floodplain and woodland bushbuck.
Tragelaphine_condition_data_PCA
Body condition metrics from 66 female Tragelaphine antelopes and the associated scores for each individual from a principal components analysis.
Bergia_RRA_data
A subset of the filtered sequencing data resulting from the fecal DNA metabarcoding analysis to characterize diets of large mammalian herbivores in Gorongosa National Park.
Bergia_cage_experiment_all_data
The plant measurements of Bergia mossambicensis for the herbivore exclusion experiments. Data was collected by Justine L. Atkins in July 2017.