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Ephemeral injuries, regeneration frequencies, and intensity of the injury-producing process

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Abstract

Organisms may suffer sublethal injuries that lead to the loss of body parts and that leave either permanent or ephemeral scars, and these can be used to understand some aspects of the injury-producing processes, such as predation. It has been shown theoretically that for injuries that leave detectable scars throughout life, proportion of injured individuals in a population reflects the probability of fatal incidents rather than the intensity of the injury-producing process itself (Schoener in Ecology 60:1110–1115, 1979). When injuries are ephemeral and leave no detectable signature, it is shown here that frequencies of injury are a function of the intensity of the injury-producing process. Moreover, if the probability of fatality from the injury-producing process is low, as would be the case for partial or cropping predation, regeneration frequencies can be used to infer the intensity of the injury-producing process if the rate of regeneration is known.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (DEB 1036393; EAR 0824793), the National Geographic Society (NGS 8505-08; NGS 9283-13). The author thanks three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1079, USA

    Tomasz K. Baumiller

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  1. Tomasz K. Baumiller
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Correspondence to Tomasz K. Baumiller.

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Communicated by U. Sommer.

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Baumiller, T.K. Ephemeral injuries, regeneration frequencies, and intensity of the injury-producing process. Mar Biol 160, 3233–3239 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-013-2302-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-013-2302-9

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