Paleobiology, 42(4), 2016, pp. 659–669 DOI: 10.1017/pab.2016.6
The relationship between diet and body mass in terrestrial mammals
Silvia Pineda-Munoz, Alistair R. Evans, and John Alroy
Abstract.—Diet and body mass are highly important factors in mammalian ecology, and they have also proven to be powerful paleoecological indicators. Our previous research has proposed a new classification scheme formammals withmore dietary divisions that emphasizes the primary resource in a given diet. We analyzed a database summarizing the dietary preferences of 139 species of marsupial and placental terrestrial mammals (including 14 orders) and their average body masses in order to explore whether this new classification better highlights ecomorphological differences between species. Addition- ally, the dietary diversity of every species in the data set was quantified by applying the inverse Simpson index to stomach content percentages. We observed a decrease in maximum dietary diversity with increasing body mass. Having lower requirements for energy and nutrients per unit of body weight or ecological advantages such as larger home ranges allows largermammals to feed on less nutritive feeding resources (i.e., structural plantmaterial). Our results also suggest that body-size ranges are different across dietary specializations. Smaller mammals (<1kg) are mainly insectivores, granivores, or mixed feeders, while bigger animals (>30kg) are usually either carnivores or herbivores that feed specifically on grasses andleaves. Themedium-size range (1–30kg) ismostly composedof frugivorous species that inhabit tropical and subtropical rain forests. Thus, the near absence ofmedium-sizedmammals in open environments such as savannas can be linked to the decreasing density of fruit trees needed to support a pure frugivorous diet year-round. In other words, seasonality of precipitation prevents species from specializing on a totally frugivorous diet.Our results suggest that this newclassification scheme correlateswellwith bodymass, one of the most studied morphological variables in paleoecology and ecomorphology. Therefore, the classifi- cation should serve as a useful basis for future paleoclimatological studies.
Silvia Pineda-Munoz* and John Alroy. Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, New South Wales 2109, Australia. E-mail:
silvia.pineda-munoz@students.mq.edu.au,
john.alroy@
mq.edu.au. *Present address: Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
Alistair R. Evans. School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. E-mail:
arevans@fastmail.fm.
Accepted: 8 January 2016 Published online: 18 March 2016 Supplemental materials deposited at Dryad:: doi:10.5061/
dryad.br45b.
Introduction
diverse, having adapted to fill most available ecological niches (Eisenberg 1981; Wilson and Reeder 2005; Ungar 2010). In an effort to under- stand this successful radiation, special attention has been paid to the ecological diversity of mammalian communities and its relationship with climate (Andrews et al. 1979; Eisenberg 1981; Legendre 1986; Petchey et al. 2008). For example, various proxies such as dental morphology and stable isotopes have been used to explore dietary diversity in past and present ecosystems (Demes and Creel 1988; Palmqvist et al. 2003; Wilson et al. 2012). Reconstructing the interaction between ecological diversity and climate can help track global climate changes
Contemporary mammals are extraordinarily © 2016 The Paleontological Society. All rights reserved.
throughout the geological timescale by inferring the climate and ecological context of fossil localities (Andrews and Evans 1979; Fortelius et al. 2002; Liu et al. 2012). Body mass is a crucial factor in the dynamics
of mammalian evolution (Alroy 1998; Burness et al. 2001; Smith and Lyons 2011). For example, similar body-mass distributions can be observed across different continents and geological time periods (Brown and Nicoletto 1991; Smith et al. 2004; Fernández-Hernández et al. 2006; Travouillon and Legendre 2009; Smith and Lyons 2011). However, the factors that may constrain body-mass distributions in fossil and modern mammal communities are still open to investigation. Previous work has suggested physiological and mechanical
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