Abstract
While the populations of large herbivores are being depleted in many tropical rainforests, the importance of their trophic role in the ecological functioning and biodiversity of these ecosystems is still not well evaluated. This is due to the outstanding plant diversity that they feed upon and the inherent difficulties involved in observing their elusive behaviour. Classically, the diet of elusive tropical herbivores is studied through the observation of browsing signs and macroscopic analysis of faeces or stomach contents. In this study, we illustrate that the original coupling of classic methods with genetic and ethnobotanical approaches yields information both about the diet diversity, the foraging modalities and the potential impact on vegetation of the largest terrestrial mammal of Amazonia, the lowland tapir. The study was conducted in the Guianan shield, where the ecology of tapirs has been less investigated. We identified 92 new species, 51 new genera and 13 new families of plants eaten by tapirs. We discuss the relative contribution of our different approaches, notably the contribution of genetic barcoding, used for the first time to investigate the diet of a large tropical mammal, and how local traditional ecological knowledge is accredited and valuable for research on the ecology of elusive animals.
Highlights
The lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris Linnaeus, 1758) is the largest terrestrial herbivore of the Neotropics and it has been present in the rainforest vegetation since before the Pleistocene [1]
New insights in tapir consumed taxa Since the diet of lowland tapirs is diverse and the knowledge of consumed plants is limited by the amount of sampled materials [22], any new study is likely to discover new plant taxa consumed by tapirs
We took a multidisciplinary approach and unveiled new species browsed by lowland tapirs (Table S4)
Summary
The lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris Linnaeus, 1758) is the largest terrestrial herbivore of the Neotropics and it has been present in the rainforest vegetation since before the Pleistocene [1]. The ecological consequences of this decline of large herbivores remain poorly documented [6,7,8,9]. This decline may lead to shifts in ecological function [6,7,8,9] and in plant species diversity [10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. The diversity in plant species consumed and the degree of frugivory of the lowland tapir’s diet are suspected to vary regionally and seasonally, most probably as a consequence of resource availability. All these methods are tedious, and they typically rely on incomplete samples, possibly underestimating quantitatively the resource used by tapirs and revealing its diet only in part
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