Frugivory in Neotropical bats: patterns emerging from meta-analysis of diet

SÁNCHEZ MARIANO S. ; GIANNINI NORBERTO P.; BARQUEZ RUBÉN M.

Mendoza

Congreso; 10 th International Mammalogical Congress; 2009

GIB, IADIZA, CCT, CONICET, IFM Y SAREM

Phyllostomid bats are principal seed dispersers and pollinators of Netropical rainforests. Literature on phyllostomids abound in dietary studies, yet achieving an adequate synthesis of assemblage patterns, evolutionary patterns, or both, remains elusive. We set out to uncover those patterns via a meta-analysis of the dietary information available. We choose nine independent publications carried out in localities from 5 major biomes of Central and South America. These studies thoroughly sampled diet of most phytophagous phyllostomid species present syntopically in the corresponding study localities, comprising roughly 65% of all available dietary records and representing fruit removal records for 46 plant genera. We recoded the dietary data on an ordinal scale to make records comparable across studies, solving conflicts when present. With those records we built a composite dietary matrix that included 28 species of phyllostomid bats in the genera Artibeus (10 species), Carollia (4), Sturnira (4), Vampyressa (3), Phyllostomus (2), Chiroderma (1), Glossophaga (1), Platyrrhinus (1), Uroderma (1) and Rhinophylla (1). The recoded data matrix was submitted to Correspondence Analisis (CA) controlled by phylogeny. Members of each major clade tended to cluster together and be associated with specific plant genera in close agreement with previous hypotheses advanced on the basis of much less inclusive sampling of bat diversity or restricted to single well-sampled localities. However, species from marginal areas of the generic distributions, remarkably species of Artibeus, showed important shifts from the core diet of their respective genera toward plants available in their habitats that were typical resources of other bat genera. Modeling of dietary responses within the CA ordination exposed subtle segregation of bat species within a genus along the resource axes. This reveals a hierarchical assemblage structure at the regional scale that is connected with cladogenetic events reconstructed along the evolutionary history of phyllostomid bats and their plants.