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Dietary relationships among coexisting anuran amphibians: a worldwide quantitative review

  • Community ecology - Original research
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Abstract

Anuran amphibians have traditionally been considered suitable model organisms for community ecology studies. In this paper, we review and quantitatively re-analyze the original studies published on dietary relationships among anuran communities worldwide. We re-analyzed 33 independent communities from all continents, including data on prey numbers and/or prey volumes. All datasets underwent null model re-analysis using two randomization algorithms. In addition, logistic regression models were used to identify specific assemblage patterns. We discovered three main patterns: (1) one particular algorithm (RA2, which replaces every cell in the matrix with one randomly chosen, but retains the zero structure of the matrix) performed much better at uncovering community structure; (2) nonrandom structure was more likely to occur in tropical than in nontropical regions; (3) prey volume was a better descriptor of dietary relationships than prey number when attempting to detect nonrandom structure. We showed that: pattern (1) depended on both the overall generalist nature of the anurans in general and on the mathematical properties of RA2; pattern (2) was consistent with theoretical attributes of tropicality; and pattern (3) was due to the intrinsic ecological properties of generalist organisms, which forage more or less opportunistically on prey of very different sizes; hence, when prey number is used as a diet descriptor, there is a risk of approximating different prey taxa that make different relative volume contributions to the overall diet as being of similar relevance .

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank L & V Ltd., for funding our research. We also thank F. Castro and D. Scilipoti for their inspiration and responsible discussions, and A. Babolat for the enjoyable time we spent together whilst working on this manuscript. We are indebted to M. Bennet and R. Federer for linguistic revision.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Università Roma Tre, Viale Marconi, 446, 00146, Rome, Italy

    Leonardo Vignoli

  2. F.I.Z.V. (Ecology) and Centre of Environmental Studies DEMETRA s.r.l, Via Olona7, 00198, Rome, Italy

    Luca Luiselli

  3. Center for Evolutionary Ecology, Largo San Leonardo Murialdo, 1, 00146, Rome, Italy

    Leonardo Vignoli

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  1. Leonardo Vignoli
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  2. Luca Luiselli
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Correspondence to Leonardo Vignoli.

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Communicated by Raoul Van Damme.

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Vignoli, L., Luiselli, L. Dietary relationships among coexisting anuran amphibians: a worldwide quantitative review. Oecologia 169, 499–509 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-011-2204-9

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