Feeding ecology of guerezas in the Kakamega Forest, Kenya: The importance of Moraceae fruit in their diet

Eastern black-and-white colobus (Colobus guereza), or guerezas, have long b een considered to be one of the most folivorous primates. I conducted a stu dy of the feeding ecology of two guereza groups (T and O) over an annual cy cle in the Kakamega Forest of western Kenya. I found that the annual diets of both groups comprised mostly of leaves (T: 48%, O: 57%) though fruit (T: 44%, 0: 33%) also accounted for a substantial portion of the diet. In the six months when fruit was most abundant, fruit consumption constituted an a verage of 58% of T-group's monthly diet and 42% of O-group's monthly diet I n contrast to most previous studies of colobines, in which seeds were the p rimary fruit item consumed, almost all of the fruit eaten by guerezas at Ka kamega consisted of whole fruits. At least 72% of the whole fruits consumed by T-and O-groups were whole fruits from trees in the Moraceae family, whi ch dominates the tree family biomass at Kakamega. Unlike at sites where gue rezas consumed fruit primarily when young leaves were scarce, at Kakamega g uerezas ate fruit in accordance with its availability and irrespective of t he availability of young leaves My findings demonstrate that guerezas are m ore dietarily flexible than was previously known, which may help to explain why the species can survive in such a wide variety of forested habitats ac ross equatorial Africa.