The relationship between wing morphology and foraging guilds: exploring the evolution of wing ecomorphs in bats

Abstract

Abstract Different aspects of foraging strategies in bats have been studied to understand the evolution of flight in mammals. General descriptors of wing morphology associated with flight performance, such as aspect ratio and wing loading, allowed us to describe ecomorphs determined by the dietary preferences of bat species. However, the role of wing shape divergence in the evolution of bat foraging strategies remains little explored. We adopted a two-dimensional geometric morphometric approach to quantify the wing shape and size variation explained by phylogenetic relatedness (families) and to evaluate the covariance between foraging guilds and flight descriptors based on phylogenetic comparative methods in 69 Neotropical bat species. We tested whether wing morphology represents a reliable marker of the foraging guild, and we explored the rate of shape evolution among foraging guilds to describe divergent trends that could explain the morphological and ecological diversification. Our results suggest that the earliest bat ancestor was an aerial forager occupying the edge space, which is congruent with the observed evolution of wing shape from an edge space wing morphology. The relationship between wing shape and foraging space defines wing ecomorphs, which probably evolved early in bat ancestors; a process other than convergence could explain this association.