Thanks to Babbel, a language learning  app, for supporting this episode.

If you’re interested in growing your  language skills, SciShow viewers get up to 65% off with a 20 day money-back  guarantee when you use our link. [♪ INTRO] If you map out the food web of an  ecosystem and figure out what eats what, you’ll find that a lot of critters  are scavengers, to some degree. Creatures like opossums, raccoons, and coyotes will not turn down a readily-available meal.

Like, roadkill, a dumpster of rotting food? The world is their buffet. Except, research suggests that  scavengers are also pretty picky about what they’re eating, especially  regarding the kind of meat they’re dining on.

in a pile of roadkill, it has standards.

And these new findings are  helping scientists learn that the world of scavenging is much  more nuanced than they thought. Most studies on meat-eating  scavengers have involved setting out the bodies of dead herbivores,  or plant-eaters, as bait. Rarely has research focused  on how scavengers respond when they’re presented with animal carcasses  from higher up on the food chain; with animals that eat other  animals, as opposed to plants.

But as the field continues to grow,  researchers have branched out. For instance, in a 2022 study  from the University of Georgia, researchers learned more about  how meat-eating scavengers respond when they’re given a bit of a menu. They set out chicken, duck, and two  species of vulture carcasses in the wild, and used remote cameras to see who stopped by.

In the end, their dinner guests included coyotes, opossums, raccoons, and vultures. And the researchers found that these  scavengers preferred the chicken and ducks! They left the vultures relatively  untouched by comparison.

This suggests that meat-eating  scavengers are particular about what their dinner was  dining on before it died. And that pickiness may be to help  keep them safe from disease.   For instance, vultures feed  exclusively on dead animals, so they may carry more transmissible  diseases than other carrion. But even more generally, researchers  believe that it might just be riskier for a meat-eater  to eat another meat-eater.

Since those animals are often  closely related, it’s possible that diseases could spread more easily between them. So if a coyote eats a dead  raccoon, it could be more likely to pick up a disease that would make them sick. And to that end, scavengers also tend to  steer clear of cannibalism all together.

This is thought to be so that they  can avoid picking up any parasites that easily spread among  members of their own species. To be fair, the researchers did find  that some of the vultures they observed visited the chicken and the  vulture carcasses equally. But the team suggested that  these birds were immature and hadn’t learned what was  best for them to eat yet.

Like a little like a toddler who  will shove anything in their mouth. Now, the pickiness of scavengers  might not just benefit them. After all, by eating dead  animals, they help keep diseases from spreading through an ecosystem.

And by avoiding the carnivore carcasses, scavengers can help with the clean-up  while keeping themselves safe. But you might’ve noticed that there aren’t just piles and piles of vulture  carcasses sitting around, either. So, someone has to be cleaning those up.

A lot of that work is being  done by scavenging insects and microbes that work to break  down and decompose the carcass. These creatures help clean up what  other creatures don’t want to eat. And they are hard at work on  pretty much every carcass, even while scavengers are munching on them.

They’re just harder to notice because  they operate at a much slower pace. We’re talking on the scale  of several weeks to months, depending on the environment, versus a vulture that might finish chowing down in a few days. But despite being little,  they’re getting the job done!

And decomposers are providing important nutrients for the entire ecosystem along the way. Like, since most scavengers  don’t care for vulture carcasses, those precious nutrients  would otherwise go to waste. But insects are happy to chow down on them.

And plenty of creatures are happy to eat insects. So, the flow of nutrients  in the food web continues. Overall, a 2011 study found  that scavenging is seriously underestimated in food web studies.

When it’s appropriately  accounted for, the process moves 124 times more energy through a  food web than predation alone. So as nasty as it might sometimes seem  to us, scavenging is a complex behavior that fills multiple roles in an ecosystem. And without it, disease transmission  might be much higher, too.

So, the next time you see a bird  going hard at a roadkill buffet, know that they are just helping  out, moving nutrients along, and keeping our ecosystems  and planet clean and healthy. If you’re a picky eater, those  scavengers have a solution. After all, it can be hard to decide what to eat.

And it can be just as hard to decide  which language to pick up next. So Babbel has your solution for that problem. Babbel is the #1 language  learning app in the world and currently offers 14 different  languages to choose from.

Babbel is award-winning technology,  not the kind of technology that leaves the lessons up to robots. Babbel lessons are designed  by real language teachers without machine learning algorithms or AI. AI can’t teach you slang, and the context  for it, like Babbel’s expert teachers can.

With Babbel, you’ll learn  more than just vocab words. You’ll learn about the culture, the  people, and the history behind a language. And you can use what you’ve learned from  those lessons in real-life situations after only five hours of practice.

So if after five hours, you  change your mind from learning Turkish to Indonesian, Babbel can  help you learn that language too. And since you watch SciShow, when you sign up using the link in the description  down below, you’ll get up 65% off. Babbel also comes with a 20  day money back guarantee, so you can start your language  learning journey without hesitation.

Thanks for watching this SciShow video  and thanks to Babbel for supporting it! [♪ OUTRO]