Temperate snake community in South America: is diet determined by phylogeny or ecology?

ABSTRACT: Communities are complex and dynamic systems that change with time. The first attempts to explain how they were structured involve contemporary phenomena like ecological interactions between species (e.g., competition and predation) and led to the competition-predation hypothesis. Recently, the deep history hypothesis has emerged, which suggests that profound differences in the evolutionary history of organisms resulted in a number of ecological features that remain largely on species that are part of existing communities. Nevertheless, both phylogenetic structure and ecological interactions can act together to determine the structure of a community. Because diet is one of the main niche axes, in this study we evaluated, for the first time, the impact of ecological and phylogenetic factors

SUBMITTER: Bellini GP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4422434 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature