ArticleScientific reports2017
Diet of land birds along an elevational gradient in Papua New Guinea.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Functional and Phylogenetic Structure of Forest Bird Assemblages Along an Afrotropical Elevational Gradient.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Camera traps unable to determine whether plasticine models of caterpillars reliably measure bird predation.PloS one · 2025Article
- Black-throated blue warblers (Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Reorganization of bird communities along a rainforest elevation gradient during a strong El Niño event in Papua New Guinea.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Bird preferences for fruit size, but not color, vary in accordance with fruit traits along a tropical elevational gradient.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Determinants of departure to natal dispersal across an elevational gradient in a long-lived raptor species.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Article
- Specific gut bacterial responses to natural diets of tropical birds.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Species-specific but not phylosymbiotic gut microbiomes of New Guinean passerine birds are shaped by diet and flight-associated gut modifications.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Last Glacial Maximum led to community-wide population expansion in a montane songbird radiation in highland Papua New Guinea.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Diet specialization and brood parasitism in cuckoo species.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Dietary effects on gut microbiota of the mesquite lizard Sceloporus grammicus (Wiegmann, 1828) across different altitudes.Microbiome · 2020Article
- Article
- Insectivorous birds consume an estimated 400-500 million tons of prey annually.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2018Article
- Comparative Analyses of the Digestive Tract Microbiota of New Guinean Passerine Birds.Frontiers in microbiology · 2018Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Food preferences and exploitation are crucial to many aspects of avian ecology and are of increasing importance as we progress in our understanding of community ecology. We studied birds and their feeding specialization in the Central Range of Papua New Guinea, at eight study sites along a complete (200 to 3700 m a.s.l.) rainforest elevational gradient. The relative species richness and abundance increased with increasing elevation for insect and nectar eating birds, and decreased with elevation for fruit feeding birds. Using emetic tartar, we coerced 999 individuals from 99 bird species to regurgitate their stomach contents and studied these food samples. The proportion of arthropods in food samples increased with increasing elevation at the expense of plant material. Body size of arthropods eaten by birds decreased with increasing elevation. This reflected the parallel elevational trend in the body size of arthropods available in the forest understory. Body size of insectivorous birds was significantly positively correlated with the body size of arthropods they ate. Coleoptera were the most exploited arthropods, followed by Araneae, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera. Selectivity indexes showed that most of the arthropod taxa were taken opportunistically, reflecting the spatial patterns in arthropod abundances to which the birds were exposed.
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