Diet of a guild of geckos in a fragmented, human‐altered African rainforest

Abstract

The ecology of gekkonids occurring in African forests is poorly known. In this paper, we analyse the feeding habits of a guild of sympatric geckos at a forest‐plantation mosaic area in south‐eastern Nigeria. Faeces were collected on handling from Hemidactylus brookii, H. fasciatus, H. intestinalis, H. mabouia, H. echinus, and Lygodactylus conraui. All species proved to be dietary generalists, with diets based almost entirely on arthropods. However, food niche overlap values between pairs of species were relatively low and Monte Carlo simulations (with RA2 and RA3 algorithms) showed that the overlap values between H. fasciatus and H. intestinalis were significantly higher than those observed for other pairs of species. Monte‐Carlo simulations on co‐occurrence estimators (C‐score, V‐ratio, and number of species combinations) revealed that the gecko guild was not competitively structured along the trophic niche dimension.