The Guenons: Diversity and Adaptation in African Monkeys

Abstract

Dietary data have been used to address numerous theoretical issues, yet we have little understanding of dietary flexibility in primates. Previous comparative research has either explicitly or implicitly assumed that the closer the phylogenetic proximity between two taxa, or the spatial proximity between two populations of the same taxon, the more similar their diets will be. We examine such assumptions by making dietary comparisons among arboreal Cercopithecus species at the intergroup, interdemic, interpopulational, and interspecific levels. Our analyses reveal considerable variation and sometimes the magnitude of the variation of particular contrasts is unexpected. We conclude that dietary flexibility blurs our traditional trophic assessment of primate species. Thus, a study of the diet of a single group, in a specific habitat, at one point in time may not be representative of the species as a whole. This flexibility suggests that a profitable avenue of future research is quantifying the degree of flexibility that different primate lineages have in their digestive strategies.