Abstract:
Animals should adapt their foraging habits, changing their dietary breadth in response to variation in the richness and availability of food resources. Understanding how species modify their dietary breadth according to variation in resource richness would support predictions of their responses to environmental changes that alter prey communities.
We evaluated relationships between the dietary breadth of large terrestrial carnivores and the local richness of large prey (defined as the number of species). We tested alternative predictions suggested by ecological and evolutionary theories: with increasing prey richness, species would (1) show a more diverse diet, thus broadening their dietary breadth, or (2) narrow their dietary breadth, indicating specialisation on a smaller number of prey.
We collated data from 505 studies of the diets of 12 species of large terrestrial mammalian carnivores to model relationships between two indices of dietary breadth and local prey richness.
For the majority of species, we found no evidence for narrowing dietary breadth (i.e. increased specialisation) with increasing prey richness. Although the snow leopard and the dhole appeared to use a lower number of large prey species with increasing prey richness, larger sample sizes are needed to support this result.
With increasing prey richness, the five largest carnivores (puma Puma concolor, spotted hyaena Crocuta crocuta, jaguar Panthera onca, lion Panthera leo, and tiger Panthera tigris), plus the Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx and the grey wolf Canis lupus (which are usually top predators in the areas from which data were obtained), showed greater dietary breadth and/or used a greater number of large prey species (i.e. increased generalism).
We suggest that dominant large carnivores encounter little competition in expanding their dietary breadth with increasing prey richness; conversely, the dietary niche of subordinate large carnivores is limited by competition with larger, dominant predators. We suggest that, over evolutionary time, resource partitioning is more important in shaping the dietary niche of smaller, inferior competitors than the niche of dominant ones.
Description:
Supplementary material: Appendix S1. List of potential prey that were excluded from the analysis for African wild dog, cheetah, leopard, and spotted hyaena, i.e. species which have not been reported to be preyed on by that carnivore.
Appendix S2. List of papers considered for analyses, for each carnivore species. Data from studies with the same number of asterisks were pooled for analysis.
Appendix S3. Relationships between indices of dietary breadth and prey richness for large terrestrial carnivores: model coefficients and 0.95 confidence intervals of fitted models.
