Abstract
Angiosperms have been essential components of primate diets for millions of years, but the relative importance of different angiosperm families remains unclear. Here, we assess the contribution and ecological and evolutionary significance of plant families to diets of wild primates by compiling an unprecedented dataset of almost 9000 dietary records from 141 primary sources covering 112 primate species. Of the 205 angiosperm plant families recorded in primate diets, only 10 were consumed by more than half of primate species. Plants of the Moraceae and Fabaceae families were the most widely and frequently consumed, and they likely represent keystone resources for primates. Over 75% of species fed on these two families, and together they made up a median of approximately 13% of primate diets. By analysing the relative proportion of different plant parts consumed, we found that Moraceae was mainly eaten as fruit and Fabaceae as non-fruit parts, with the consumption of these two families not showing a significant phylogenetic signal across primate species. Moraceae consumption was associated with small home range sizes, even though more frugivorous primates tended to have larger home ranges compared to more folivorous species, possibly due to the year-round availability of moraceous fruits and the asynchrony in their phenology. Our results suggest that primates may be intricately and subtly shaped by the plant families that they have consumed over millions of years, and highlight the importance of detailed dietary studies to better understand primate ecology and evolution.
Highlights
Tropical angiosperms have been a major source of nutrition for primates throughout their evolutionary history [1]
To evaluate if closely related primate species would feed on a given plant family to a similar degree, we tested if the consumption of the widely consumed plant families showed a phylogenetic signal across the primate phylogeny
When analysing patterns of frugivory, we found that primates with a larger percentage of Moraceae in their fruit diet had smaller home range sizes
Summary
Tropical angiosperms have been a major source of nutrition for primates throughout their evolutionary history [1]. For all families consumed by more than 50% of primate species, we quantified the percentages of each family (regardless of plant part) in the diet of each primate species (averaged across multiple studies of the same species) and the relative consumption of different plant parts (leaf, fruit and other) for each plant family (for more methodological details, see supplementary material and electronic supplementary material, figure S2). We analysed the occurrence of each of the widely consumed families in the diet (yes or no) using a binary measure of phylogenetic signal, D, which is based on a Brownian threshold model [25] This allowed us to test if consumption of any given family was more likely within closely related primates, regardless of the degree of consumption observed. Phylogenetic SEMs were constructed from component PGLS models using the piecewiseSEM R package v. 2.1.0 [36]
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