INECOA   26036
INSTITUTO DE ECORREGIONES ANDINAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Frugivores' morphological and chemical interaction niches relationship: It is not what it looks like
Autor/es:
TOBIAS N. ROJAS; PEDRO G. BLENDINGER; ROMÁN A. RUGGERA
Lugar:
Corbett Landscape
Reunión:
Simposio; 7th Frugivores and seed dispersal symposium; 2020
Resumen:
Consumption of fruits by frugivores could direct the evolution of particular combinations of fruit traits. While frugivores use morphological and chemical fruit traits as cues to make foraging decisions, it is known that both types of traits are found to be vaguely related in fruits. Interaction niches (INs), or the multivariate space constructed with the traits of interaction partners, is a promising tool to test the relationship strength among fruit traits in the diet. To understand how morphological and chemical IN relate, we constructed IN for morphological and chemical traits using seed-dispersal networks. We i) estimated the relationship between INs via co-inertia analysis and ii) originality (distance from community centroid) and uniqueness (distance to closest neighbor) for each niche centroid to evaluate the relationship of these measures with specialization (d′) and number of interaction partners; iii) we fitted a GLM to test the relationship between estimated dispersion of INs with specialization (d′) and number of partners; iv) we used two null models to evaluate departures from frequency of interactions and number of species used by frugivores. We found an important difference when comparing co-inertia of morphological and chemical fruit traits (RV = 0.3) with co-inertia of morphological and chemical frugivores INs (RV = 0.7). Chemical and morphological originality were negatively related with the number of interaction partners (b = −0.5; b = −0.4, respectively). IN dispersions were positively related with the number of interaction partners (b = 0.6, morphological; b = 0.6 chemical). Comparison of null models suggest that frequency of interactions and number of partners are the main shapers of the observed patterns. Our results show that the number of partners determines the amplitude and position of the centroid of the IN and that fruit trait relationships are unlikely to be strengthened by frugivore foraging decisions. In summary, frugivores consume a combination of fruit traits similar to the community centroid, this usage of different food elements could fit with the diet complementarity mechanism.