Diets of Pleistocene insular dwarf deer revealed by dental microwear texture analysis

Variation and process of life history evolution in insular dwarfism as revealed by a natural experiment

“…As with Kerama deer, it is possible that phenotypic plasticity partially influenced the growth trajectories of them. We do not currently have any reliable sources of information on the nutritional status of fossil deer, except for their dietary habits [39, 46]. However, reports of healed bone fractures on a number of leg bones from a museum collection of fossil insular deer of Okinawa Island [47] implies that these deer survived long enough to recover from serious leg injuries, refuting the possibility that fossil Okinawa deer were malnourished and their body growth was suppressed due to a lack of resources.…”

“…Here, the same age data (n = 45) were used to depict survivorship curves following the method of Caughley [63]. Variability of age estimation based on the molar wear rate was tested and discussed in previous studies [38, 46, 64], and we used the most appropriate age estimates. Age data of three sika deer populations that were used to investigate the long bone histology (Hokkaido, Honshu, and Yakushima Island populations) and an insular population free from hunting (Kinkazan Island) were collected from the literature [38, 65].…”

Inter-microscope comparability of dental microwear texture data obtained from different optical profilometers

“…No other routine resulted in comparable results for the SSFA parameter Asfc, but as it is of great importance and generally applied, congruence should have high priority. Additionally, the applied filters were those originally developed for the specific microscopic devices (Schulz et al 2010(Schulz et al , 2013Aiba et al 2019;Kubo and Fujita 2021), which is additionally beneficial when considering data comparability of already published datasets.…”

“…Further data processing was conducted in MountainsMap 8.2, including re-analysis of the data obtained from the μ surf Custom at the University of Hamburg. Data were treated in two ways: Applying a slightly modified version of the standard protocol established for the Keyence VK-9700 at the Kubo lab (Aiba et al 2019, Kubo and Fujita 2021) which includes mirroring all surfaces in x and z (to compensate for the moulding procedure), levelling (least-square plane by subtraction), spatial filtering (robust Gaussian filter with a cut-off value of 0.8 μm), filling of non-measured points using the smoothing function of Mountains Map, noise-reduction by thresholding (upper and lower 0.5 %), removal of outliers (maximum slope of 85%) and form removal (polynomial of increasing power = 2). This protocol will hereafter be termed Filter A. Following the standard protocol established for the μ surf Custom at the Kaiser Lab (Schulz et al 2010, 2013) which includes mirroring all surfaces in x and z (to compensate for the moulding procedure), levelling (least-square plane by subtraction), spatial filtering (denoising median 5 x 5 filter size and Gaussian 3 x 3 filter size; default cut-offs are used), filling of non-measured points using the smoothing function of Mountains Map, noise-reduction by thresholding (upper and lower 0.5 %), removal of outliers (maximum slope of 85%) and form removal (polynomial of increasing power = 2).…”

“…1. Applying a slightly modified version of the standard protocol established for the Keyence VK-9700 at the Kubo lab (Aiba et al 2019, Kubo andFujita 2021) which includes mirroring all surfaces in x and z (to compensate for the moulding procedure), levelling (least-square plane by subtraction), spatial filtering (robust Gaussian filter with a cut-off value of 0.8 μm), filling of nonmeasured points using the smoothing function of Mountains Map, noise-reduction by thresholding (upper and lower 0.5 %), removal of outliers (maximum slope of 85%) and form removal (polynomial of increasing power = 2). This protocol will hereafter be termed Filter A.…”