Rare long-term data reveal the seasonal dietary plasticity of mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) in response to fruiting tree phenology

Abstract

Understanding primate dietary plasticity provides insights into trait evolution and resilience to environmental change. Here, we investigate the feeding ecology of mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx), a species that forms groups of close to 1000 individuals, which presumably impacts feeding ecology by creating exceptionally high feeding competition. Mandrills are also threatened by habitat loss and climate change, and a full understanding of their dietary plasticity is essential to ongoing conservation efforts. Evidence suggests that mandrills are generalist feeders and consume a wide variety of resources to compensate for shortfalls in fruit availability. However, a lack of long-term data on fruit production within the mandrill geographic range means that it is unknown whether the flexible feeding strategies observed previously are stable over multiple years. We combined two rare data sets comprising 8 years of fecal collection and fruit availability to assess the dietary flexibility of mandrills in Lopé National Park, Gabon. We found fruit to be the most frequently consumed resource and fruit consumption covaried positively with fruit availability, peaking during periods of fruit abundance. Mandrill dietary diversity increased during periods of fruit scarcity, through greater consumption of animal prey, leaves, seeds, and other plant fibers. These results demonstrate that mandrills are primarily frugivorous, but that they are also highly flexible feeders, able to respond to temporal variation in fruit production over several annual cycles. In addition, we found that mandrills varied in the extent to which they preferred different fruit taxa. Lipid-rich oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) fruits were by far the most frequently consumed resource and may constitute a staple resource for mandrills in the study site. Our multiyear study provides robust evidence for generalist feeding behavior by mandrills, which may be driven by extreme group sizes or past environmental fluctuations and provide resilience to future environmental change.