Morphology and stable isotope analysis demonstrate different structuring of bat communities in rainforest and savannah habitats.

ABSTRACT: Bats play important ecological roles in tropical systems, yet how these communities are structured is still poorly understood. Our study explores the structure of African bat communities using morphological characters to define the morphospace occupied by these bats and stable isotope analysis to define their dietary niche breadth. We compared two communities, one in rainforest (Liberia) and one in savannah (South Africa), and asked whether the greater richness in the rainforest was due to more species 'packing' into the same morphospace and trophic space than bats from the savannah, or some other arrangement. In the rainforest, bats occupied a larger area in morphospace and species packing was higher than in the savannah; although this difference disappeared when comparing insectivorous b

SUBMITTER: Monadjem A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6304110 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature