More Choosy for Minor Foods: Diet, Seasonality and Food Selection in Sympatric Frugivorous and Folivorous Lemurs.

ABSTRACT: Despite traditional dietary categories common in primatology (folivore, frugivore, insectivore), most primates use one or more food types beyond their primary one. Among lemurs, folivores tend to have a complicated, long gastrointestinal tract with an enlarged cecum, shearing teeth, and microbiome adaptations to foliage, while frugivores have simple teeth and guts and fast gut passage. Yet frugivores often eat some leaves, and folivores eat some fruit, and little is known about the selection rules they follow within each food type. We quantified diet and food chemistry for two sympatric rainforest lemurs: a cathemeral frugivore (brown lemur, Eulemur fulvus) and a diurnal folivore (diademed sifaka, Propithecus diadema) over 18 and 13 months. Brown lemurs ate 78.3% fruit and 13

SUBMITTER: Irwin MT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11904312 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature