Guilds of large carnivorans during the Pleistocene of Europe: a community structure analysis based on foraging strategies

This study investigates the community structure, dynamics and evolution of the guilds of large carnivorans during the Pleistocene of Europe. Emphasis is given to important renewals, the composition of the guilds in terms of dietary preferences and foraging strategies, and to intraguild competition for access to food resources. For this purpose, cluster, principal component, and guild structure analyses are performed combining four ecological/behavioural parameters -body mass, diet, prey acquisition strategy, sociality- of large carnivorans that practice hunting and/or scavenging on large prey. Results show only minimal niche overlap, indicating that large predators may have reduced/avoided competition by almost exclusively occupying different niches, i.e. they did not compete for the same resources and/or employed different foraging strategy. Such niche partitioning and competition avoidance may have reduced the occurrences of potential trophic conflict and could explain the cooccurrence of a high diversity of large predators within the same broad feeding guild. Furthermore, the major predator guild remodeling took place close to the Early/Middle Pleistocene transition, when previously dominant carnivorans (e.g. Pachycrocuta, Megantereon, Acinonyx, Panthera gombaszoegensis) went extinct and new immigrants arrived (e.g. Panthera spelaea, Panthera pardus, Crocuta crocuta), forming the Galerian to Late Pleistocene guilds. Finally, the inclusion of the meat-eating Homo in the carnivore guild is discussed, including its possible impact to the demise of carnivoran diversity and accordingly of the several large carnivoran niches towards the end of the Pleistocene.

Automated summary

This study investigates the community structure, dynamics, and evolution of large carnivoran guilds during the Pleistocene in Europe. Results show minimal niche overlap among large predators, indicating competition avoidance through occupying different niches. The major guild remodeling occurred during the Early/Middle Pleistocene transition, potentially due to extinctions of previously dominant carnivorans and the arrival of new immigrants.