Assembly, persistence, and disassembly dynamics of Quaternary Caribbean frugivore communities

How communities assemble and restructure is of critical importance to ecological theory, evolutionary theory, and conservation, but long-term perspectives on the patterns and processes of community assembly are rarely integrated into traditional community ecology, and the utility of communities as an ecological concept has been repeatedly questioned in part due to a lack of temporal perspective. Through a synthesis of paleontological and neontological data, I reconstruct Caribbean frugivore communities over the Quaternary (2.58 mya – present). Numerous Caribbean frugivore lineages arise during periods coincident with the global origins of plant-frugivore mutualisms. The persistence of many of these lineages into the Quaternary is indicative of long-term community stability, but an analysis of Quaternary extinctions reveals a non-random loss of large-bodied mammalian and reptilian frugivores. Anthropogenic impacts, including human niche construction, underlie the recent reorganization of frugivore communities, setting the stage for continued declines and evolutionary responses in plants that have lost mutualistic partners. These impacts also support ongoing and future introductions of invader complexes: introduced plants and frugivores that further exacerbate native biodiversity loss by interacting more strongly with one another than with native plants or frugivores. This work illustrates the importance of paleontological data and perspectives in conceptualizing ecological communities, which are dynamic and important entities.