Frugivory in Neotropical Bats: Patterns Emerging From Meta-Analysis of Diet.

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

IMC-10 International Mammalogical Congress

Congreso; IMC-10 International Mammalogical Congress; 2009

International Federation of Mammalogists

Phyllostomid bats are principal seed dispersers and pollinators of Netropical rainforests. Literature on phyllostomids abound indietary studies, yet achieving an adequate synthesis of assemblage patterns, evolutionary patterns, or both, remains elusive. We setout to uncover those patterns via a meta-analysis of the dietary information available. We choose nine independent publicationscarried out in localities from 5 major biomes of Central and South America. These studies thoroughly sampled diet of most phytophagousphyllostomid species present syntopically in the corresponding study localities, comprising roughly 65% of all available dietaryrecords and representing fruit removal records for 46 plant genera. We recoded the dietary data on an ordinal scale to make recordscomparable across studies, solving conflicts when present. With those records we built a composite dietary matrix that included 28species 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 CorrespondenceAnalisis (CA) controlled by phylogeny. Members of each major clade tended to cluster together and be associated with specific plantgenera in close agreement with previous hypotheses advanced on the basis of much less inclusive sampling of bat diversity orrestricted to single well-sampled localities. However, species from marginal areas of the generic distributions, remarkably species ofArtibeus, showed important shifts from the core diet of their respective genera toward plants available in their habitats that weretypical resources of other bat genera. Modeling of dietary responses within the CA ordination exposed subtle segregation of batspecies within a genus along the resource axes. This reveals a hierarchical assemblage structure at the regional scale that isconnected with cladogenetic events reconstructed along the evolutionary history of phyllostomid bats and their plants.