Megafaunal Rodents: Behaviour and Ecological Roles of Southeast Asian Forest Porcupines
Kim R. McConkey, Alicia Solana Mena, Param bin Pura, Charang Muhamad Tauhid bin Tunil, Husin Sudin A/L Din, Lisa Ong, Ahimsa Campos‐Arceiz, Sean Eeshwaran Sinnaveeran, Sanjay D. Ramarao, Ee Phin Wong · 2025
Read Megafaunal Rodents: Behaviour and Ecological Roles of Southeast Asian Forest Porcupines by Kim R. McConkey, Alicia Solana Mena, Param bin Pura, Charang Muhamad Tauhid bin Tunil, Husin Sudin A/L Din, Lisa Ong, Ahimsa Campos‐Arceiz, Sean Eeshwaran Sinnaveeran, Sanjay D. Ramarao, Ee Phin Wong (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12687056.txt.
Description
Kim R McConkey and nine co-authors tally the jobs porcupines do in a Malaysian rainforest. Their 2025 paper studies the two local species, among the largest rodents in Southeast Asia, inside the Belum-Temenggor forest. The team tested four suspected services, watching burrows with cameras, surveying seedlings on burrow mounds, and gathering local Indigenous knowledge of what the animals eat.
Burrows turned out to be shared infrastructure, visited or used by at least twenty-two other species. Seedlings grew richer and denser on burrow tops than at control spots. The porcupines ate some eighty plant species, killing the seeds of about two thirds but spreading about a third, mostly by hoarding, including many big-seeded species otherwise moved by elephants. The authors argue these overlooked animals quietly maintain forest function, and their decline would register widely.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kim R. McConkey, Alicia Solana Mena, Param bin Pura, Charang Muhamad Tauhid bin Tunil, Husin Sudin A/L Din, Lisa Ong, Ahimsa Campos‐Arceiz, Sean Eeshwaran Sinnaveeran, Sanjay D. Ramarao, Ee Phin Wong |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 47 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |