A Hungarian study finds that plant seeds can benefit when their original carrier gets eaten by an owl.
Tag - zoochory
Alun Salt
Goth Rabbits spread Vampire Plants
Rabbits tend to nibble on vegetation rather than dry fruits, but the black Amami rabbits of Japan seem to be eating the fruits and spreading the seeds of an unusual plant.
In Madagascar, the lemurs need the trees, and the trees need the lemurs
Hikori Sato explains why a living forest isn't just a collection of trees.
Sore diners, cycads and birds…
… and now to … dinosaurs (!). Dinosaurs? Well, we did say at the outset of this mini series of articles that ‘seeds and animals’ was a very old association. Unlike the other animal associations mentioned already in this...
Nigel Chaffey
Does this seedling taste fishy to you…? ***
NIgel Chaffey returns with another tale of asyníthchory, this time involving fish.
Seed dispersal, the Ecuadorian dimension…
Rather belatedly in our look at animals and seed dispersal, we have our Darwin connection (after all, what biological item would be complete without mention of that venerable Victorian vegephile, Charles Darwin?). If...
Cocoa, chimpanzees, and the restorative value of gorilla dung…
Having reached mammals in our meanderings, and the human involvement in global plant dispersal (admirably explored in Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire) notwithstanding, we couldn’t ignore our nearest and...
From cocks and hens * to cockroaches (and elephants…)
Yasuhiro Uehara and Naoto Sugiura describe a new mutualistic relationship between a cockroach and Monotropastrum humile (Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 185: 113–118, 2017; ). [M. humile is a mycoheterotrophic...
Plant survival, on a wing and a prayer…*
As organisms that are mainly fixed in one place, plants have a problem if they are to extend their range and spread to new areas by production of a new generation. This fixedness of plants is also a barrier when it...
