Abstract
Abstract: Studying feeding habits is crucial to understand complex predator-prey interactions. Even though anurans play a fundamental role in the control of arthropods populations, the diet of several Neotropical species is poorly known. We describe the frequency and occurrence of prey items and their dry mass in stomach contents of the Robber Frog Pristimantis paulodutrai in the north east of the state of Bahia, Brazil. Based on the stomach contents of 30 individuals, Araneae, Isopoda, and Formicidae were found to be the most important food items. The generalist diet of this frog, which seems to be phylogenetically conserved among Pristimantis, is likely to be linked to its ecological dominance in the habitats surveyed. Our study corroborates the high trophic relevance of Robber Frogs in tropical forests as generalist predators.
Highlights
While studies of feeding habits of anurans have been increasing in number (e.g., Ortega et al 2005, Forti et al 2011, Solé et al 2019), the relationship between frogs and their preys is still little known
In this study we aimed to identify the diet composition of this species, and given its ecological dominance among other amphibian species, we expected to find a rich assemblage of consumed preys
We examined 90 adult specimens of P. paulodutrai deposited in the Natural History Museum of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), collected by Bastazini et al (2007) and previously used for ecologic, taxonomic, morphometric, and/or cytogenetic studies on the genus Pristimantis (e.g., Bastazini et al 2007, Napoli et al 2009, Dabés et al 2012, Trevisan et al 2020)
Summary
While studies of feeding habits of anurans have been increasing in number (e.g., Ortega et al 2005, Forti et al 2011, Solé et al 2019), the relationship between frogs and their preys is still little known. The diet of frogs is affected by their foraging behaviour and the characteristics of microhabitats (Toft 1995). The genus Pristimantis Jiménez de la Espada, 1870 comprises 566 species, distributed from southern Central America to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Frost 2021). Most members of this genus are generalist predators (Arroyo et al 2008, Garcia-R et al 2015, Gutiérrez-Cárdenas et al 2016). Knowledge about the natural history of these direct-developing frogs is still incipient, and the diet of several species, among them Pristimantis paulodutrai (Bokermann, 1975), which is the subject of our study, remains unknown
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