The Living Dead: Time to Integrate Scavenging into Ecological Teaching

Abstract

In recent years, exciting scientific evidence has emerged highlighting the ecological importance of dead animals (i.e., carrion) and their consumption (i.e., scavenging), to the point that we could consider this the golden age of scavenging research. We now have a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work that indicates that scavenging is fundamental to properly understanding not only food web, community, and population ecology but also evolution, biodiversity conservation, and human well-being. However, universities fail to integrate scavenging into ecological teaching, as can be judged from the lack of importance of this process in ecology textbooks. We consider this a paramount gap in ecological education, and we advocate that students should be aware of the important role that carrion and scavengers play in ecosystems. Integrating scavenging principles and applications into ecology textbooks will broaden the ecological foundation of the next generation of ecologists.