The Interplay of Habitat and Seed Type on Scatterhoarding Behavior in a Fragmented Afromontane Forest Landscape |
| |
Authors: | Babale Aliyu Hammadu Adamu Elena Moltchanova Pierre Michel Forget Hazel Chapman |
| |
Affiliation: | 1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, , PB 4800 Christchurch, New Zealand;2. Nigerian Montane Forest Project, , Yelwa village, Taraba State, Nigeria;3. Department of Biology, Gombe State University, , Gombe, Gombe State, Nigeria;4. Department of Math and Statistics, University of Canterbury, , PB 4800 Christchurch, New Zealand;5. Département Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, CNRS UMR 7179, , 91800 Brunoy, France |
| |
Abstract: | Scatterhoarding by rodents, whereby seeds are collected and stored for later consumption, can result in seed dispersal. Seeds may be covered in litter on the forest floor (cached) or buried. This is particularly so in the Neotropics for large, nutritious seeds, and where primary dispersers are rare or missing. In African forests, contemporary anthropogenic pressures such as hunting, forest degradation, and fragmentation are contributing toward major declines in large frugivores, yet the potential for scatterhoarding to mitigate this loss is largely unknown. In this study, we used thread‐marked seed to explore the balance between seed predation and dispersal by rodents in Afromontane forest. We studied two tree species in three habitats: (1) continuous forest; (2) continuous forest edge, and (3) small, degraded riparian forest patches. We found that seed removal rates were high and almost the same in all three habitats for both tree species, but that the predation/dispersal balance differed among habitats. In continuous forest, more seeds of each species were scatterhoarded than depredated, and rates of scatterhoarding differed between the two species. In all habitats, burying seeds up to 2 cm belowground was more common than caching. Distances seeds were moved was approximately five times greater in continuous forest than in forest edge or riparian patches. We found strong evidence to suggest that the African pouched rat, Cricetomys sp. nov was responsible for the scatterhoarding. |
| |
Keywords: | Afromontane forest conditional mutualisms diplochory rodents scatter hoarding seed dispersal |
|
|