Seasonal and habitat effects on the nutritional properties of savanna vegetation: Potential implications for early hominin dietary ecology.

The African savannas that many early hominins occupied likely experienced stark seasonality and contained mosaic habitats (i.e., combinations of woodlands, wetlands, grasslands, etc.

Within trophic level shifts in collagen-carbonate stable carbon isotope spacing are propagated by diet and digestive physiology in large mammal herbivores.

Stable carbon isotope analyses of vertebrate hard tissues such as bones, teeth, and tusks provide information about animal diets in ecological, archeological, and paleontological contexts. There is debate about how carbon isotope compositions of collagen and apatite carbonate differ in terms of their relationship to diet, and to each other. We evaluated relationships between δC and δC among free-ranging southern African mammals to test predictions about the influences of dietary and physiological differences between species.

Grass leaves as potential hominin dietary resources.

Discussions about early hominin diets have generally excluded grass leaves as a staple food resource, despite their ubiquity in most early hominin habitats. In particular, stable carbon isotope studies have shown a prevalent C component in the diets of most taxa, and grass leaves are the single most abundant C resource in African savannas. Grass leaves are typically portrayed as having little nutritional value (e.

Carnivore stable carbon isotope niches reflect predator-prey size relationships in African savannas.

Predator-prey size relationships are among the most important patterns underlying the structure and function of ecological communities. Indeed, these relationships have already been shown to be important for understanding patterns of macroevolution and differential extinction in the terrestrial vertebrate fossil record. Stable isotope analysis (SIA) is a powerful remote approach to examining animal diets and paleodiets.

Stable isotope series from elephant ivory reveal lifetime histories of a true dietary generalist.

Longitudinal studies have revealed how variation in resource use within consumer populations can impact their dynamics and functional significance in communities. Here, we investigate multi-decadal diet variations within individuals of a keystone megaherbivore species, the African elephant (Loxodonta africana), using serial stable isotope analysis of tusks from the Kruger National Park, South Africa. These records, representing the longest continuous diet histories documented for any extant species, reveal extensive seasonal and annual variations in isotopic--and hence dietary--niches of individuals, but little variation between them.

Landscape-scale feeding patterns of African elephant inferred from carbon isotope analysis of feces.

The African elephant (Loxodonta africana) is a large-bodied, generalist herbivore that eats both browse and grass. The proportions of browse and grass consumed are largely expected to reflect the relative availability of these resources. We investigated variations in browse (C(3) biomass) and grass (C(4)) intake of the African elephant across seasons and habitats by stable carbon isotope analysis of elephant feces collected from Kruger National Park, South Africa.

Inter- and intrahabitat dietary variability of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) in South African savannas based on fecal delta13C, delta15N, and %N.

Baboons are dietary generalists, consuming a wide range of food items in varying proportions. It is thus difficult to quantify and explain the dietary behavior of these primates. We present stable carbon (delta(13)C) and nitrogen (delta(15)N) isotopic data, and percentage nitrogen (%N), of feces from chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) living in two savanna environments of South Africa: the mountainous Waterberg region and the low-lying Kruger National Park.