Linking feeding ecology and population abundance: a review of food resource limitation on primates

By G. Hanya, Colin A. Chapman. Ecological research, 2013

85 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We review studies that consider how food affects primate population abundance. In order to explain spatial variation in primate abundance, various correlates that parameterize quality and quantity of food in the habitat have been examined. We propose two hypotheses concerning how resource availability and its seasonality determine animal abundance. When the quality of fallback foods (foods eaten during the scarcity of preferred foods) is too low to satisfy nutritional requirement, total annual food quantity should determine population size, but this relationship can be modified by the quality or the quantity of fallback foods. This mechanism has been established for Japanese macaques and sportive lemurs that survive lean seasons by fat storage or extremely low metabolism. Second, when fallback food quality is high enough to satisfy nutritional requirement but quantity is limited, quantity of fallback food should be a limiting factor of animal abundance. This is supported by the correlation between fig density, which is a high-quality fallback food, and gibbon and orangutan abundance. For a direct test of these hypotheses, we need more research that determines both the quality of food that animals require to satisfy their nutritional requirement and the quantity of food production. Leaves are often regarded as superabundant, but this assumption needs careful examination.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8b9935ff4611b3b33853ab0d01dde7dbd2d4d80

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. C. A. Peres
2. Leonor Patricia Cerdeira Morellato
3. I. Mendoza
4. Alexander C. Lees
5. M. Benchimol
6. Jos Barlow
7. M. Galetti
8. M. Tabarelli

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. C. A. Peres
2. Vanessa G. Staggemeier
3. Leonor Patricia Cerdeira Morellato
4. I. Mendoza

In Social Psychology

1. C. A. Peres
2. M. Benchimol
3. Alexander C. Lees
4. Colin A. Chapman
5. M. E. Irwin

Citations in the corpus

• Linking plant phenology to conservation biology (2016, background): “The impact of global change on plant phenology is not expected to be uniform across all species, and effects at the species level may lead to consequences at the community level, potentially changing the timing of flowering or fruiting peaks and the duration of reproductive seasons (Donnelly et al.,”