IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Prevosti, F.J.; Pereira, J.A. | |
| Community structure of South American Carnivores in the Past and Present | |
| 2014 Journal of Mammal Evolution (21): 363-368 | |
Understanding the causes that structure natural communities has long been an important goal for biologists. The question of what regulates the distribution and abundance of species in communities is central because it connects widespread processes (e.g., competition, predation), historical effects, and the interactions of these competing mechanisms with the mixture dependent on the habitats and organisms involved. Carnivores (mammals with a carnivorous diet), particularly, play a crucial role in maintaining the structure and stability of communities through predation, competition, or by altering prey behavior and prey habitat selection. For this reason, they have been used as a model to understand the effects of competition or top-down control in community structure. Although carnivores are naturally rare, due to their position at the top of the food web, their removal can have a variety of cascading effects within the community (Ripple et al. 2013). Current diversity of South American terrestrial carnivorans (mammals of the Order Carnivora) is relatively high, with 40 out of 245 species (ca. 16%) of the order occurring in this subcontinent (Hunter 2011). But the geological record shows that a rich diversity of meat-eaters also inhabited South America in the past (Prevosti and Soibelzon 2012). During the lower-middle Miocene, carnivores from this part of the world were mainly represented by some groups of didelphimorphian marsupials and the extinct metatherian clade Sparassodonta, and carnivorans only migrated to South America starting in the late Miocene (Marshall 1978; Prevosti and Soibelzon 2012; Prevosti et al. 2013). Although interesting advances regarding community structure of modern South American carnivores have been made during the last decades (see below), knowledge about the structure of historical assemblages is still poor. Determining the structure and dynamics of present and past food webs will be useful to gain insight into the forces that model carnivoran communities. |
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