Dining Habits Of Snakes Shaped By Ancestry, Not Ecology

New findings published in the journal PLOS ONE from the Instituto Nacional de Limnologia, Argentina and colleagues show that diets of snakes from a temperate region in South America may depend more on phylogeny (ancestry) than ecology.

Based on the history of evolution, scientists suspect that this deep-rooted background may be phylogeny-based. With ecological interactions from a competition-predation hypothesis, researchers worked to determine the structure of snake communities.

For the study, they specifically looked at diet to understand the impact of ecological and phylogenetic factors on the diet of Neotropical snakes from the subtropical-temperate region of South America. In addition to evaluating the snakes' ecology and natural history, researchers examined their dietary data by analyzing over 2,000 specimens that belong to 25 species of snakes over 20 years.

Diet variation could be explained by ancestry or phylogeny, according to the study authors. However, ecological characters explained little of this variation, which the greatest variability was shown via subfamily Dipsadinae, whose family members had a different type of diet that was based on soft-bodied invertebrates.

The author's results suggest that phylogeny plays a large role in diet, consistent with the deep history hypothesis.

More information regrading the findings can be seen here.