The herbivore as prisoner of its food supply

In this review we consider the asymmetry in the relation between the herbivore and its food supply: successively we will touch upon the limits to feasible exploitation as the food supply is depleted, the repercussions for the reproductive performance of the herbivore when a mismatch between requirement and food on offer occurs, and finally the universal feature of seasonal habitat shifts in grazing systems, with the herbivore tracking the availability of forage of adequate quality. All of these features, taken together, imply a close fit between herbivore numbers and the food supply in a given grazing system; we will provide an example of this from a region where climatic vagaries are sufficiently restricted to allow a review of animal biomass statistics to be undertaken against a backdrop of assumed constant forage production.

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