Claudio A. Moraga

Fundación CEQUA

Environmental microbes routinely colonize wildlife body surface microbiota. However, animals experience dynamic environmental shifts throughout their daily routine. Yet, the effect of ecological shifts in wildlife body surface microbiota has been poorly explored. Here, we sequenced the hypervariable region V3–V4 of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize...

The nesting site of Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) at Tucker islets (54°09'S; 70°17'W), Chile, is documented and information from the first population abundance estimate on the largest islet during the beginning of chick rearing is provided. Ground-based counts yielded an estimate of 8883 (95% Confidence Intervals: 6653–11,802) burro...

Animal hosts live in continuous interaction with bacterial partners, yet we still lack a clear understanding of the ecological drivers of animal-associated bacteria, particularly in seabirds. Here, we investigated the effect of body site in the structure and diversity of bacterial communities of two seabirds in the Strait of Magellan: the Magellani...

Wild herbivore distribution responds to habitat and forage availability modulated by predation risk and inter-specific interactions. Nowadays, the study of distribution and abundance of wild and domestic herbivores have regained importance to understand and diminish conservation conflicts in productive lands worldwide. Contiguous ranching and prote...

Following a drastic population decline of guanaco populations throughout the 1970s in Argentina and the Chilean Patagonia, the Chilean government, in collaboration with national and international researchers, accrued increased scientific knowledge of the species. These efforts contributed to meaningful protection and conservation measures, initiall...

Previous attempts to address the presence of interspecific competition between domestic livestock and wild ungulates have focused largely on habitat or dietary overlaps. Although overlaps in habitat or diet create opportunities for competition to occur between species, competition only results from such overlap if it affects one or both species neg...

In extensive livestock production, high densities may inhibit regulation processes, maintaining high levels of intraspecific competition over time. During competition, individuals typically modify their behaviours, particularly feeding and bite rates, which can therefore be used as indicators of competition. Over eight consecutive seasons, we inves...

Natural herbivore populations have experienced uninterrupted pressures from direct and evident domestic-wildlife interactions and competition, to indirect or less obvious ones such as pathogen transmission. Thus, pathogen spillover between wild and domestic animals is a constant concern because the domestic-wildlife interface represents the ecologi...

Increasing food security and preventing further loss of biodiversity are two of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Yet, efforts to address these challenges often lead to situations of conflict between the interests of agricultural production and those of biodiversity conservation. Here, we focus on conflicts between livestock production and the c...

Sub-Antarctic rangelands are characterized by weather seasonality and abundant winter snowfall. These climate factors determine most livestock management decisions. Nonetheless, data on these weather patterns are only available for some areas of the region, and management is entirely empirically-derived. The aim of this study was twofold: to compil...

Diet overlap estimation among species is important to understand interspecific interactions. Through these interactions, one species may extinguish others through competition or adapt through mechanisms such as resource partitioning. The introduction of domestic herbivores in a native assemblage may introduce competition for resources with wild her...

One of the most important questions for rewilding is how to succeed. With few rewilding experiences there is little information to guide how to overcome ecological and social limitations to the process. To fill this need, a natural proxy for rewilding would be current population increases and redistribution of wildlife, that serves as an example fo...

Wildlife conservation success without turning wildlife into a pest: the socioecological challenge of the recovering guanacos in Magallanes and Central Andes of Chile Claudio Moraga (University of Florida) & Solange Vargas (Universidad de La Serena) Recovering wildlife is challenging management in productive rangelands. Socio-ecological research a...

The family Haematopodidae is widely distributed in coastal regions worldwide and in Chile there are three species: American oystercatcher (Haematopus palliatus), Magellanic oystercatcher (H. leucopodus), and Blackish oystercatcher (H. ater). Despite the wide distribution of these birds, there are few records of lice. The objective of this study was...

Protected areas (PAs) are critically important means to preserve species and maintain natural ecosystems. However, the potential impacts of chemical pollution on PAs are seldom mentioned in the scientific literature. Research on the extent of the occurrence of chemical pollution inside PAs and in-depth assessments of how chemical contaminants may a...

Locally abundant ungulates often come into con-flict with human activities. After a population collapse that reached its nadir in the 1970s, the guanaco Lama guanicoe population in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, recovered and is now in conflict with sheep ranching and commercial log-ging. We studied the effects of livestock density and environmental fact...

The diet of the American puma (Puma concolor) was studied in 1988 and 2004 in the foothills of the volcanoes Mocho and Choshuenco, Valdivian rainforest, southern Chile, through the identification of prey-items in their feces and field surveys of European wild boar (Sus scrofa) carcasses. We reported for the first time the invader European wild boar...

The diet of the American puma (Puma concolor) was studied in 1988 and 2004 in the foothills of the volcanoes Mocho and Choshuenco, Valdivian rainforest, southern Chile, through the identification of prey-items in their feces and field surveys of European wild boar (Sus scrofa) carcasses. We reported for the first time the invader European wild boar...

The diet of the American puma (Puma concolor) was studied in 1988 and 2004 in the foothills of the volcanoes Mocho and Choshuenco, Valdivian rainforest, southern Chile, through the identifi cation of prey-items in their feces and field surveys of European wild boar (Sus scrofa) carcasses. We reported for the fi rst time the invader European wild bo...

The huemul is the most threatened cervid of the Neotropical Region. It is estimated that its historic distribution range in Chile has shrunk in over 50%, while its global population size would not exceed 2500 individuals. Taking into consideration this critical situation, the Workshop “Towards an Action Plan for the Conservation of Huemul in the Au...

Predation is considered one of the principal selective forces involved in the evolution of social species (Wilson 1975). The main benefits of social group formation include the reduction of the per capita probability of fall-ing victim to predation when group size increases (dilu-tion effect; Hamilton 1971) and increases in the ability to detect pr...