scientist believe that thousands of years ago , megafauna like mastadons helped dot the enormous seeds of many plant . They ’d feed the seed , and then lodge them in their wanderings . But , with those creatures millennia dead , how do these plants still survive ? In one case , itdue to stealing - hump rodents .
In Panama , the black palm seeds are a target of the Central American agouti , a gnawer about the size of a housecat . Far too diminished to disperse the seeds by eat on and digesting them , the Dasyprocta aguti is still very happy to hoard and eat them . But can these minuscule creatures sprinkle the seeds as far and as effectively as an enormous animal like a mammoth ?
By establish radio tracker on hundreds of seeds , researchers were capable to follow their advancement over the course of a yr , and found that there ’s more going on here than just the agoutis stealing and eating the pitch-black palm seed . Instead , the rodents will take them , then bury them . Later , they ’ll dig them up , move them , and eat up them again . Or else another Dasyprocta aguti will come by , steal the cache , and repeat the process . So while one beast might not move a germ very far , in concert they can disperse the seeds wide .
Some 35 % of the ejaculate move more than 100 m , 14 % survived the full year , and one seed was go 36 times over 749 meter before finally being devoured . So while people do n’t generally suppose of rodents as being good at dispersing seeds in the wilds , this time they were near enough at the Book of Job to keep a august species from going out .
exposure by Geoff Gallice on Flickr
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