Food habits of Hylaeamys seuanezi (Weksler, Geise & Cerqueira, 1999) (Rodentia: Cricetidae) in forest formations: a comparison of methods and habitats

ABSTRACT

Food habits are traces of a species’ natural history that help us to understand how the organisms interact with the environment. Hylaeamys seuanezi is a forest-specialist rodent also recorded in diverse shaded cocoa agroforestry systems. Here we describe and classify its diet, comparing the results acquired from stomach and fecal contents, collected in forest and cocoa agroforest sites. We analyzed 203 samples from 126 individuals: 51 captured in agroforest and 75 in forest. We measured the relative contribution of vegetable and animal matter and the relative frequency of 17 food items. Our results indicate that H. seuanezi consumes a greater proportion of vegetable than animal matter, but should be considered omnivore, given the frequent consumption of arthropods. The richness and composition of items was similar between stomach and fecal samples. The richness of items also did not vary between the environments, but the composition of the items did. Intact seeds were more frequent in samples from forests and unidentified arthropods and Hymenoptera in samples from agroforest. Despite variation among consumed items, the diverse shaded cocoa agroforestry systems provide a diversity of resources, which likely favor the maintenance of H. seuanezi in these plantations and in the study region.

KEYWORDS:

• Atlantic Forest
• diet
• small mammal
• feeding ecology

Acknowledgments

We thank the Laboratório de Ecologia Aplicada à Conservação and Laboratório de Zoologia de Vertebrados for logistical support, and Caipora’s and Rhip’s fraternities, specitally to Adna Alves, Elson Rios, Gean Zanetti and Rebeca Sampaio, for field and data collection assistance. We are also grateful to Santiago Alvarez Martinez for the English translation and to former reviewers for enhancing the previous versions of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

Data set is available from Mendeley repository (doi:10.17632/wn5282×z6v.1).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01650521.2023.2265642.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by INCT IN-TREE [CNPq-465767/2014-1, CAPES-23038.000776/2017-54], CNPq-PPBio Rede BioMA [457524/2012-0], SISBIOTA [563216/2010-7], FAPESB-PPP [0008/2011] and UESC [073.6764.2020.0003917-18; 00220.1100.1264; 00220.1100.1645 and 00220.1100.1536]. We thank CAPES and UESC - ICB for MFCS masters’ and undergrad scholarships, respectively.