Reviewing primate dietary profiles worldwide: a continuum of dietary strategies

Non-human primate diets have been the focus of a vast cumulative field observational effort which now enable an enhanced level of comparative analysis. Classification of dietary strategies into discrete categories inevitably leads to a loss of detail and often overlooks geographic, seasonal, and other forms of variation. We review the feeding ecology and major dietary profiles of wild non-human primates worldwide. For 72 genera, we show the relative three-way contributions of folivory, frugivory and faunivory, and explore the association between diet and the anatomical constraint of body size. The dietary flexibility demonstrated in specialist and generalist feeders highlights the challenge of assigning primate species into fixed, discrete categories, and the concept of a continuum of dietary strategies offers the possibility of a more informative approach. We hope to motivate more detailed regional assessments of primate diets, eventually culminating in a worldwide synthesis and accompanying database of primate feeding studies.