A Multifaceted Approach for Analyzing Primate Dietary Diversity and Competition

Abstract

This project tests the hypothesis that primates respond to competition over food resources by focusing their feeding on underutilized resources. This shift in feeding focus is hypothesized to cause change to primates’ tooth shape and change their dietary isotopes. Because teeth and isotopes are shown to accurately reflect diet, dental shape analyses were employed to analyze the degree of dental trait variability and isotope analysis examined differences in diet between primate dyads that live together and separately. This project asks three research questions: 1) do closely-related primate species focus their diet on a few key food items when they live together compared to the same species when they occur separately? and 2) do closely-related primate species display morphological traits and isotopic signatures that reflect a focus on fewer key resources when they live together compared to the same species when they occur separately? 3) do the teeth of fossil primates from the Early Miocene display similar dental traits as extant primates which might point to secondary resource use?