%0 Journal Article
%T A Distributed Experiment Demonstrates Widespread Sodium Limitation in Grassland Food Webs
%J The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America - Wiley Online Library
%D 2019
%R https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1509
%X Insects from Texas to Minnesota crave salt and search through their grassland homes to find it. A team from the University of Oklahoma put 5,000 miles on their research vehicles in the 2017 field season to study the nutritional preferences of grassland insect communities. A simple experiment repeated over 54 grassland sites revealed that after two days, prairie patches splashed with simulated cow urine averaged 70% more bugs than those splashed with water. In effect, plants do not need salt, but plant eaters do. There was also a geographical twist: Grasslands that were less salty hosted insects with keener cravings for salt. These photographs illustrate the article Ħ°A distributed experiment demonstrates widespread sodium limitation in grassland food websĦħ by Ellen A. R. Welti, Nathan J. Sanders, Kirsten M. deBeurs, and Michael Kaspari published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.260
%U https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bes2.1509