Fruits eaten by woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagothricha) at local and regional scales.

Abstract

Woolly monkeys are endangered New World Primates whose natural ecological requirements are known from few sites. This study aimed to investigate the diet of woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagothricha, Atelidae) to examine how availability determines fruit choice at local and regional scales. We followed two groups of woolly monkeys in the Mosiro Itajura-Caparú biological station in the Colombian Amazon for 16months, and then compared our observations with previous studies for this and other sites in the Amazon and eastern Andes. We found a high prevalence of fruits in the diet of woolly monkeys in Caparú, which was supplemented with arthropods and leaves. This pattern was observed in all age/sex classes, although juveniles ate more arthropods, and females with dependent young ate more leaves than other classes. We suggest these differences might be due to intragroup competition and particular nutritional requirements in each age/sex class. When comparing the fruit diet composition in Caparú (>190 species) with four other places, we found that Moraceae, Fabaceae, and Sapotaceae were consistently important tree families in the Amazonian sites, and that forest richness is a good predictor of the diet richness. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that woolly monkeys are opportunistic frugivores that are able to adapt their diet to the forest supply and to the temporal variation in resource availability.