Robert G. White James S. Sedinger Donna G. Robertson Jerry W. Hupp 1996 <p><span>We measured forage intake, digestibility, and retention time for 11 free-ranging, human-imprinted lesser snow geese (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Chen caerulescens caerulescens</i><span>) as they consumed underground stembases of tall cotton-grass (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Eriophorum angustifolium</i><span>) on an arctic staging area in northeastern Alaska. Geese fed in small patches (<i>x̄</i></span><span>=21.5 m</span>²<span>) of forage that made up ≤3% of the study area and consisted of high-quality “aquatic graminoid” and intermediate-quality “wet sedge” vegetation types. Dominant geese spent more time feeding in aquatic graminoid areas (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">r</i><span>=0.61), but less total time feeding and more time resting than subdominant geese. Subdominant geese were displaced to areas of wet sedge where cotton-grass was a smaller proportion of underground biomass. Geese metabolized an average of 48% of the organic matter in stembases and there was a positive correlation between dominance and organic matter metabolizability (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">r</i><span>=0.61). Total mean retention time of forage was 1.37 h and dry matter intake was 14.3 g/h. Snow geese that stage on the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea likely use an extensive area because they consume a large mass of forage and exploit habitats that are patchily distributed and make up a small percentage of the landscape. Individual variation in nutrient absorption may result from agonistic interactions in an environment where resources are heterogeneously distributed.</span></p> application/pdf 10.1007/BF00334646 en Springer Forage digestibility and intake by lesser snow geese: effects of dominance and resource heterogeneity article