1. Are you what you eat? Patterns in primate feeding

2. Goals for today... Body size and Basal Metabolic rate
Body size and diet (Kay’s Threshold)
Anatomy and diet
Dietary patterns

3. 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)

4. Irony of BMR
Relative to their body size, larger animals do not expend as much energy as smaller ones.

5. 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. (Kay’s Threshold handout)

6. 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

7. 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

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

9. 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

10. 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.

11. Examples….. Brown lemurs Gut transit = 0.5 hrs Bamboo lemur