Volta

Digestive Organ Size and Behavior of Red Knots (Calidris Canutus) Indicate the Quality of Their Benthic Food Stocks

Assuming that animals respond optimally to environmental changes, both behavior and physiology should be useful indicators of the way that animals perceive the quality of their environment. For verification, we examined foraging time and gizzard size of the red knot (Calidris canutus), a long-distance migrant shorebird that ingests hard-shelled mollusk prey whole and therefore readily faces digestive constraints. Nevertheless, even when digestively bottlenecked, knots can still enhance their daily energy intake by flexibly increasing the size of their digestive system, notably the gizzard, and/or by feeding longer per day. Whether such adjustments are actually necessary depends on the quality (condition) of their food, i.e., the ratio of flesh to shell mass. Hence, gizzard mass and daily foraging time in knots …

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