Are you what you eat? Patterns in primate feeding

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Are you what you eat?Patterns in primate feeding
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Goals for today...

• Body size and Basal Metabolic rate
• Body size and diet (Kays Threshold)
• Anatomy and diet
• Dietary patterns

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Basal Metabolic rate (BMR)

• Amount of energy an animal expends in a resting
  state. (measured in amount of oxygen consumed).
  

• Table 4.2 (handout)
• Mouse to elephant graph (Figure 6.1- handout)

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Irony of BMR

• Relative to their body size, larger animals do
  not expend as much energy as smaller ones.

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Body size and diet

• Dietary intake increases with body weight
  (figure 9.8, handout)

• Dietary patterns and diet quality fall out with
  body size generally. (Kays Threshold handout)

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Jarman-Bell Principle
nutrient requirement Body Weight
Total nutrient requirement
Large animal
Large (abundent food)
Small (poor quality foods)
Small (rare foods)
Large (high quality)
small animal
See Strier pg 40
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Tradeoff in brain and gut

• Brain and gut are big users of metabolic energy

• See tradeoff in primate order between the two
  (see humans in particular)

Aeillo and Wheeler 1995
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Expensive tissue Hypothesis
More complex foraging behavior
Higher Diet Quality
Larger Brain
Increased energy available
Increased Energy available
Smaller Gut
Reduced bulk Rapid assimilation
Selection pressure
Relaxed constraints
Aeillo and Wheeler 1995
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Gut Morphology

• Foregut or Forestomach fermentor- food broken
  down in stomach e.g. colobus monkey.

Hindgut or ceaco-colic fermenter- food broken
down in large intestine (Wooly monkey).
See handouts in coursepak
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Body size and transit time.

• Figure 3 showing log body mass and log transit
  time (handout in coursepak)

While it takes longer to process food the larger
you are, not all variation explained.
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Examples..
Brown lemurs
Gut transit 0.5 hrs
Bamboo lemur
Gut transit 36 hrs