Outside of human influences, why do rare plant species persist instead of dwindling away to extinction? It’s a question that has plagued ecologists for centuries. Now, for the first time, scientists at Penn State and Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Argentina, demonstrate that fruit-eating birds play an important role in maintaining rare plant species.
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“We show that fruit-eating birds, just by their food-gathering behavior, help to structure the diversity of forests,” said Tomás Carlo, associate professor of biology, Penn State. “This is important because higher plant diversity is associated with increased provision of ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling and the production of food and water.”
According to Carlo, when birds eat fruits, they help plants to reproduce by spreading their seeds around.
“A couple years ago, I found some rare seeds in one of my seed traps in Puerto Rico, and I said to myself, ‘Why are these birds eating this?” Carlo said. “This is improbable. These birds are surrounded by the fruits of common species and yet a sizable proportion of their diet includes fruits of rare species.’”
Carlo and his colleague Juan Morales, a researcher at Universidad Nacional del Comahue, set out to document just how much of the seed rain—the seeds that fall to the ground due to birds’ activities—is composed of rare species. The scientists established 10 experimental plots in deforested areas of Puerto Rico. Within these plots, they monitored the activities of birds, their seed rain and the establishment of plants.
The team found that the six most common fruiting tree species accounted for 91.3 percent of the seeds available to birds. Yet, seeds from these common species comprised only 18.4 percent of the seeds distributed by birds. The remaining 81.6 percent of the seeds distributed by birds came from 43 plant species of lesser abundance. In addition, when common species became rare because of the season, birds ate proportionally more of them. This type of behavior not only accelerated the regeneration of forests in experimental plots, but also made the plant communities more diverse than otherwise would be expected. The results were published in the July 2016 issue of the journal Ecology.