Size assortment in new world bat communities

Abstract

We evaluated ubiquity of morphological overdispersion, which is characteristic of competitive interactions, in feeding guilds from 15 bat communities from North, Central, and South America. Overdispersion was detected in 10 of 15 communities and 4 of 5 feeding guilds. Although overdispersed morphological patterns exist, they are not a consistent attribute of the structure of feeding guilds within bat communities. Because of factors ranging from environmental attributes such as heterogeneity to species-specific attributes such as high mobility, morphological overdispersion in bats may at best only be a transitory outcome of the effect of competitive interactions on community structure.