Abstract
Answering the fundamental ecological question of what determines animal abundance has become critical with the accelerating need for informed management plans for endangered species. A major difficulty in testing general hypotheses to account for variation in abundance is that periods of food scarcity, which may be responsible for limiting population size, occur on a superannual basis. Research on folivorous primates suggests that periods of food scarcity are critical in determining regional biomass; however, studies of frugivores have found no single fallback food generally used by all species. In this study we quantify fruit availability during a 12-year period in Kibale National Park, Uganda to determine patterns of fruit scarcity. Over these 12 years, temporal variability in fruit availability was high; the proportion of trees per month with ripe fruit varied from 0.14 to 15.93%. In addition, there was dramatic interannual variation in fruit availability: in 1990, on average only 1.09% of trees bore ripe fruit each month, while in 1999 an average of 6.67% of trees bore fruit each month. Over the past 12 years, fruit has become more available, fruit-scarce months have declined in frequency, and the duration of periods of fruit scarcity has decreased. If figs (Ficus spp.) served as a fallback food resource over these 12 years, they would have had to be available during months when few trees were fruiting. Over this 149-month period, there were 34 months when less than 1% of monitored trees fruited. Figs were not fruiting in 17 of these months, and, in only 11 of the 34 months were more than 1% of the fig trees fruiting. Rainfall data collected since 1903 indicates that the region is becoming moister, and droughts are less frequent. There has also been a significant increase in the maximum mean monthly temperature and a decrease in the minimum mean monthly temperature since we started recording these data in 1990.
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Chapman, C.A., Chapman, L.J., Zanne, A.E., Poulsen, J.R., Clark, C.J. (2005). A 12-Year Phenological Record of Fruiting: Implications for Frugivore Populations and Indicators of Climate Change. In: Dew, J.L., Boubli, J.P. (eds) Tropical Fruits and Frugivores. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3833-X_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3833-X_5
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