When did plants become important to leaf-nosed bats? Diversification of feeding habits in the family Phyllostomidae

Abstract

A great proportion of bats of the New World family Phyllostomidae feed on fruit, nectar and pollen, and many of them present adaptations to feed also on insects and small vertebrates. So far, attempts to examine the diversification of feeding specialization in this group, and particularly the evolution of nectarivory and frugivory, have provided contradictory results. Here we propose a molecular phylogenetic hypothesis for phyllostomids. On the basis of a matrix of feeding habits that takes into account geographical and seasonal variation, we tested different hypotheses of the evolution of feeding specializations in the group. We find strong support for the evolutionary model of a direct dietary diversification from insectivory. The estimates of divergence times of phyllostomid bats and the reconstruction of ancestral states with a Bayesian approach support the parallel evolution of frugivory in five lineages and of nectarivory in three lineages during the Miocene. On the basis of these findings, and recent dietary studies, we propose that during the evolution of phyllostomids switches to new feeding mechanisms to access to abundant and/or underexploited resources provided selective advantages that favoured the appearance of ecological innovations independently in different lineages of the family. We did not find evidences to support or reject the hypothesis that the insectivorous most recent common ancestor of all phyllostomids was also phytophagous.

Phylogenetic fields of species: cross-species patterns of phylogenetic structure and geographical coexistence

“…This would allow them to occur at the same regions and coexist with closely and distantly related species, producing phylogenetic fields indistinguishable from range size variation alone. In fact, recent phylogenetic analyses suggest phenotypic and ecological stasis after early species' differentiation within Phyllostomidae followed by increasing speciation rates [44,51,52], which may account for the high number of closely related coexisting species. Finally, we cannot discard the potential effect of evolutionary range dynamics on current coexistence patterns [43,53], which may explain the lability and lack of phylogenetic signal in phyllostomid range sizes.…”

Roosting Ecology of Amazonian Bats: Evidence for Guild Structure in Hyperdiverse Mammalian Communities

“…Studies of phyllostomid adaptive radiation have hitherto focused exclusively on feeding behavior (e.g., Wetterer et al, 2000;Datzmann et al, 2010;Monteiro and Nogueira, 2011;Dumont et al, 2011;Rojas et al, 2011), resulting in scenarios that are sometimes accompanied by impressive analyses of trophic morphology. Although dietary adaptations have almost certainly played an important role in phyllostomid evolution, causal inferences in this literature would be strengthened if alternative behavioral traits that might also have influenced relevant evolutionary phenomena were considered.…”

Bayesian hierarchical models suggest oldest known plant-visiting bat was omnivorous

“…The nectarivorous morphology shared by extant bats obscures other aspects of the evolution from ancestral insectivory [16]. Switching diets from protein-rich insects to carbohydrate-rich nectar requires adaptations in sugar metabolism and kidney function, as well as body-size-dependent strategies for finding enough nectar [17,18].…”