Bottom-up and top-down processes in African ungulate communities: resources and predation acting on the relative abundance of zebra and grazing bovids - Grange - 2006 - Ecography - Wiley Online Library

Bottom-up and top-down processes in African ungulate communities: resources and predation acting on the relative abundance of zebra and grazing bovids - Grange - 2006 - Ecography - Wiley Online Library: "African ungulate populations appear to be limited principally by their food resources. Within ungulate communities, plains zebras coexist with grazing bovids of similar body size, but rarely are the dominant species. Given the highly effective nutritional strategy of the equids and the resistance of zebras to drought, this is unexpected and suggests that zebra populations may commonly be limited by other mechanisms. Long-term research in the Serengeti ecosystem and in the Kruger National Park suggests that zebra could be less sensitive to food shortage, and more sensitive to predation, than grazing bovids: if this is a general principle, then, at a larger scale, resource availability should have a weaker effect on the abundance of zebra than on grazing ruminants of similar body size (wildebeest and buffalo), and zebras should be relatively more abundant in ecosystems where predators are rare or absent."