Owing to increasing population trends and facultative predatory habits, large gulls have been identified as significant agents of change in the alteration of many ecological communities. Often, they are perceived as negatively impacting the population trends of most sympatric waterbirds. Consequently, culling programs have been implemented to remove adults, chicks and eggs intensively. Here, we review the interactions recorded in the literature between the yellow-legged gull Larus michahellis and 10 sympatric waterbirds in the Mediterranean region, all threatened and classified as species of conservation concern. We also used 177 long-term population trends derived from previous studies to study the population dynamics of these species and the culling effort performed. We show that gulls negatively affected survival, fecundity, foraging ecology and nesting habitat availability for many species. However, the annual population growth ra...
Recull d'articles científics i de divulgació relacionats amb la naturalesa de les Pitiüses, l'ecologia i l'evolució insular.