For most people, mistletoe evokes images of Christmas and perhaps a little holiday romance.
For a group of Argentine researchers, it brings to mind marsupials and defecation.
Scientists had thought that the seeds of a species of mistletoe that grows in the Lake District of Argentina were dispersed by sticking to the legs of birds that feed on the plants, which then deposited them on the branches of another tree.
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But Guillermo Amico and Marcelo A. Aizen of the Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Argentina discovered that a small, nocturnal, mouselike marsupial known as Dromiciops australis is the “exclusive disperser of the seeds.”
The researchers observed the mistletoe for 500 hours and “saw no birds eat these fruits” nor did they find any seeds in the stomachs of birds that they examined, they reported in the Dec. 21 issue of Nature.
Automatic cameras, however, captured two species of nocturnal mammals in trees where the mistletoe grew, most commonly D. australis.
“Of these two, apparently only D. australis eats and defecates intact seeds, the researchers said.
The researchers found that the animals readily ate the mistletoe and defecated the mistletoe seeds, with their shells efficiently removed after going through the animals’ digestive systems.
Both the mistletoe and the marsupial date back millions of years, “so the ancestors of D. australis could have been dispersing mistletoe seeds for more than 70 million years,” the researchers said.