Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard reports on a new study by a team of biologists that highlights how many different animals benefit from the kills of big cats.

• How might conservationists help protect animals such as mountain lions? Does such work require partnerships with different governments?

• Here are ways that animal advocates can support other movements.

New research suggests that mountain lions in the western United States play an outsize role in changing their surroundings, leading the authors of the study to suggest that the big cats are "ecosystem engineers."

In a study published online November 30th in the journal Oecologia, biologist Mark Elbroch and his colleagues demonstrate that the assortment of animals that profit from the free meals provided by the kills of mountain lions ranges from birds and mammals to insects and other invertebrates.

When the team tracked 18 lion kills in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in Wyoming, they found that the dispatched prey, such as deer and elk, supported 215 species of beetles. But Elbroch, who directs the puma program for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, realized that the beetles and other scavengers weren't just following a buffet.

"They're communing. They're finding their mates on these carcasses," he says. "They're living their entire lives from larvae to adult form on a carcass and then launching forth into the world in search of another carcass to begin that cycle all over again."

Read the full article about the role of mountain lions in engineering ecosystems by John C. Cannon at Pacific Standard.