Temporal patterns of visitation of birds and mammals at mineral licks in the Peruvian Amazon

Physical, landscape, and chemical properties of Amazonian interior forest mineral licks

Mineral licks, sites where animals go to consume soil, are key resources for herbivorous birds and mammals in the Amazon, providing supplemental dietary nutrients and toxin adsorption functions. However, because they are often difficult to find, the properties of mineral licks are poorly understood. Here, we undertake the largest survey of Amazonian mineral licks to date to determine the landscape, physical, and chemical properties of these critical sites. We used a generalized linear mixed-effects modeling framework to assess how soil samples from 83 mineral licks differ from nearby control soils in a series of physical and chemical characteristics, then used Jaccard's index of similarity and a principal component analysis (PCA) to determine how those samples differed among themselves. We found that mineral licks were generally located in specific ranges of landscape variables. Soils from mineral licks had elevated concentrations of almost all minerals measured. There was very little similarity between consumed and control samples, and within each sample type. We suggest that these mineral licks have the potential to provide multiple services to visiting species, demonstrating their ecological importance. The high levels of dissimilarity between samples indicate that a large sample of mineral licks is needed to draw conclusions in studies pertaining to geophagy. We emphasize that studying mammal and bird visitation at these sites could provide critical conservation and physiological information on cryptic and understudied species of Amazonian herbivores.

Mineral lick use by a community of large herbivores in northern Iran

Natural mineral licks are ecologically valuable resources to meet the physiological needs of herbivores, particularly in temperate forests. Importantly, licking sites can harbor high anthropogenic risk for conservation-dependent herbivores through higher chance of pathogen spillover from livestock and increased levels of poaching risks. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no information on the mineral lick use in temperate forests of west Asia and the Caucasus where a few threatened deer species exist. We monitored four naturally occurring mineral licks in Central Alborz Protected Area, northern Iran during May-July 2019 using camera traps and analyzed the mineral content of the licking sites. A total of 53 independent mineral lick visits were obtained from only three species of herbivores, i.e., Caspian red deer (Cervus elaphus maral; n = 21), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus; n = 26), and wild pig (Sus scrofa; n = 6). The sex ratio of visiting Caspian red deer was highly skewed toward females (3M:18F), whereas it was more balanced in visiting roe deer (11M:15F). The species-level distribution of visits corresponded to diurnal and cathemeral for Caspian red deer and for roe deer, respectively, without any evidence of different activity curves. There was a negative nonlinear relationship between the ambient temperature and the visitation rate. Our findings showed that mineral licks are important habitat features for these large herbivores and need to be included in spatial mapping and habitat protection measures.

Corrigendum

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1002/ece3.7006.].