Abstract
We conducted a review of long-term studies on the food habits of mammals to better understand its present situation. We searched major scientific bibliographic databases (BIOSIS and Google Scholar) and found 99 case studies from 93 published articles. Study terms varied from 2 to 16 years. There was a gap between the number of case studies and the number of species constituting a given Order: there were many studies dealing with Carnivora and Primates relative to their species number, while there were fewer studies on Rodentia and Chiroptera. Long-term studies on food habits have been increasing. Many studies employed fecal analyses, though there was an order-specific tendency for methods to study the food habits of animals. More than 80 percent of the studies indicated annual differences in food composition. However, most studies have not collected food availability data, and further fewer studies showed the effect of yearly changes in food habits on population parameters. Knowledge on long-term food habits of animals would contribute not only to fundamental ecology, but also to other research fields like seed dispersal and animal behavior, and toward developing conservation strategies.
