About Vultures and Australia... (1 Viewer)

[Carpenterrn]

To my knowledge, there is no known sub-fossil extinct bird of prey or large stork in Australia, which could be scavengers which went extinct together with giant marsupials. Which is interesting that in Pleistocene, there was a species of white-headed vulture in Java and adjutant stork in Flores, so geographically relatively close.

I think wedge-tailed eagles, buzzards and kites fill this niche. And this shows that ecological rules are very broad considerations, not exact ones.

 

[Carpenterrn]

Although small quite numerous kookaburras and butcherbirds, magpies, noisy miners all somewhat favor meat and also fill this role in Australia, nature abhors a vacuum!

 

[Ninox1]

Hello!

I'm helping someone put together a talk about vultures, and there was one question that came up while we were doing research that has both of us scratching our heads:

Throughout the world, vultures play a very important role as scavengers, but their act of consuming carrion also removes various harmful viruses and bacteria from the environment (including anthrax, botulism and rabies) -- their extremely acidic stomach fluids kill these pathogens, and in places where vulture populations have dropped severely, the diseases they would normally keep under control have spiked dramatically.

However, there are no vultures in Australia. Unsurprisingly, there are various scavengers there that fill a similar niche, but it's not clear to me if any of them have the same sort of pathogen-destroying prowess that vultures have that would curb the spread of the aforementioned diseases.

Could anyone possibly shed some light on this little quandary?

Thanks in advance!

in AUS, we do have crows and ravens which I believe occupy a similiar role to vultures in consuming dead animals. Australia is sparsely populated, which may also be significant in preventing spread of such diseases