This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When scientists talk about scavengers, you might imagine an animal sniffing out or stumbling across a carcass, eating as much as possible and slinking away. But like all foods, a dead animal holds a variety of macronutrients—carbohydrates, lipids (fats) and protein—all within the same carcass, or meal.
Just as an egg has a high-protein white and a higher-fat yolk, carcasses are similar. Scavengers are typically thought of as unfussy scroungers that will eat whatever is available, but our new research, published in Royal Society Open Science, suggests this isn't the case. So, which part of the carcass does a hungry dingo, wedge-tailed eagle or red fox eat first?
We know that many species—mostly herbivores or animals in a lab context—choose foods to meet their nutritional targets. Like a bodybuilder aiming to hit a protein goal, wild spider monkeys and orangutans choose foods that allow them to maintain a stable intake of protein. While there's no reason a similar phenomenon should not exist in wild carnivores, there is little to no data on the feeding choices of carnivores.
This lack of data is due to the logistical challenges in tracking them as they can be elusive and typically have large home ranges. Scavengers offer scientists a model for examining how animals decide what to eat. If different parts of a carcass offer different nutritional rewards, then scavenging may be less like eating leftovers and more like choosing from a buffet.
To find out, we monitored the carcasses of 40 eastern gray kangaroos in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales over a summer and a winter, with camera traps recording all activity. Three common and important scavengers in this area are dingoes, wedge-tailed eagles and red foxes. We took note of the kangaroo body parts they fed on and how long they fed each time.
When eagles first arrived at an intact carcass, we found they consistently chose to feed at the head and abdomen, while dingoes targeted the tail most often. Foxes, on the other hand, were outcompeted in choosing a "favorite" body part—dingoes and eagles consistently beat them to the resource and so foxes were limited to the scraps. This finding was not entirely surprising, because dingoes and eagles are classified as apex scavengers.
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