Results

A total of 17 chicken carcasses were used for carrion removal experiments. Control carcasses persisted and were monitored up to 15 days), microbe treatment carcasses up to 14 days, and invertebrate treatment carcasses up to 12 days. Carcasses placed for vertebrate consumption were removed by scavengers within one day of carcass placement. The proportion of carrion biomass remaining over time differed between treatments (figure 2). Comparison of hypothesis found maximum support for the interactive effect of time and treatment on carrion removal rate. Model parameter estimates indicated fastest removal of carcass under vertebrate scavenging followed by invertebrate scavenging, and negligible difference in carrion loss rates between decomposition and evaporation.
The parameter estimates of the best model showing individual effects of treatments on logit-transformed proportional loss of carrion biomass (Table 1) represent the logit-transformed proportional loss of carrion biomass each day under the different treatments. The inverse logit-transformations of these estimates gives us the change in proportion of carrion biomass each day, while the negative sign connotes a loss in biomass. For example, with each passing day, proportion of carrion biomass reduces by 0.99 due to vertebrate scavenging (Time x vertebrate scavenging) (Table 1). For invertebrate scavenging, proportion of carrion lost each day is 0.5, and it is 0.51 for microbial decomposition. Daily loss of carrion biomass due to evaporative moisture loss alone (Control) was estimated at 3.6%. Besides this, microbial decomposition per se resulted in 3.8% loss of carrion biomass and invertebrate scavengers per se resulted in 7.3% loss of carrion biomass daily. In contrast, vertebrate scavengers per seresulted in 83% loss of carrion biomass per day. The compounded effect of vertebrate scavenging along with invertebrate scavenging and microbial decomposition caused 99.9% carrion removal in a day (Table 2).