WoS: WOS:000827238600001
Scopus: SCOPUS_ID:85135038343
2022
artículo de investigación
Plants that bear oversized fruits, but do not co-occur with present-day large-bodied frugivores to disperse their seeds, are considered to represent seed dispersal anachronisms. It is hypothesized that these plants were originally dispersed by the megafauna that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Accordingly, many plant species in South America bearing the so-called megafaunal fruits occur in ecosystems lacking native modern megafauna. In Chile, Lardizabala biternata is an endemic vine that produces a large edible fruit, with a morphology suggesting a megafaunal seed dispersal syndrome. This species grows across the Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests and has a rather wide distribution, along which there are currently no large native vertebrates that could ingest its fruits and disperse the seeds. We hypothesized that foxes may be its present-day surrogate dispersers, because they are the only remnant mesofauna across L. biternata's range that include fruits in their diet. We collected fox scats periodically for 1 year and analyzed their contents, which revealed the presence of intact L. biternata seeds. These results suggest that foxes may be acting as present-day dispersers of this vine; however, it is unknown whether they provide effective dispersal. Our findings stress the fragmentary state of the knowledge of ecological interactions among species in Chilean ecosystems, opening new perspectives in terms of the role of terrestrial fauna in maintaining ecosystem functions.
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| WOS |
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| Ecology |
| Scopus |
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| Ecology |
| Ecology, Evolution, Behavior And Systematics |
| SciELO |
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| Sin Disciplinas |
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Publicaciones WoS (Ediciones: ISSHP, ISTP, AHCI, SSCI, SCI), Scopus, SciELO Chile.
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| Fuente |
|---|
| Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico |
| Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnólogico (Chile) |
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| Agradecimiento |
|---|
| Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cientifico y Tecnologico (CHILE), Grant/Award Number: 3200675 |
| We thank Bernardo Carmona for allowing access to the study site. We also thank Dr J. M. Fedriani and an anonymous reviewer for useful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Diego Alarcón was funded by FONDECYT 3200675 grant. |
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