Earthen piles built by a chicken-like bird in Australia aren’t just egg incubators — they may also be crucial for the distribution of key nutrients throughout the ecosystem.
But malleefowl — found throughout western and southern Australia — also perturb the soil. They and their close relatives are “megapodes,” a group of fowl native to Australasia and the South Pacific that have the unusual habit of incubating their eggs much like alligators do: in a massive pile of rotting compost. Heat from the decaying vegetation — locked in with an insulating sand layer on top — regulates the eggs’ temperature, and the young scratch their way to the surface upon hatching.
In a mallee woodland in rural South Australia, the team selected 12 mounds of varying ages. Each mound had five “microsites” — the mound itself, the ground under a nearby eucalyptus tree and under a faraway tree, and a near and far open patch of ground. At each microsite, the team analyzed nutrients in the soil and measured plant cover, abundance of individual plants and the relative cover of leaf litter and bare ground.
The impacts aren’t limited to just the mounds themselves. Even nearby open sites have higher soil phosphorus than far ones, and nearby tree sites less than six years old have more bare ground due to leaf litter harvesting. During the breeding season, malleefowl dig down to a mound nest’s egg chamber, where the female lays an egg before covering it back up. This process is repeated throughout the breeding season.The malleefowls’ impact on nutrient distribution isn’t surprising “given the huge quantity of soil and litter that these birds displace when building their mounds,” says Michelle Louw, a plant ecologist at Germany’s University of Bayreuth who is based in Johannesburg and was not involved with the research.
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