Abstract
Scatter-hoarding rodents are known to play a crucial role in the seed dispersal of many plant species. Numerous studies have indicated that both seed size and the energy content of seeds can affect rodent foraging behavior. However, seed size is usually associated with energy content per seed, making it difficult to isolate how seed size and energy affect rodent foraging preferences. This study used 99 treatments of artificial seeds (11 seed sizes×9 levels of energy content) to tease apart the effect of seed size and energy content on rodent seed-caching behavior. Both seed traits showed significant effects, but their details depended on the stage of the rodent foraging process. Seeds with higher energy content were harvested more rapidly while seed size only had a modest effect on harvest rate. However, after harvesting, seed size showed a much stronger effect on rodent foraging behavior. Rodents’ choice of which seeds to remove and cache, as well as seed dispersal distance, seemed to reflect an optimal seed size. Our findings could be adapted in future studies to gain a better understanding of scatter-hoarding rodent foraging behavior, and the co-evolutionary dynamics between plant seed production and seed dispersers.
Highlights
Scatter-hoarding rodents are known to play a crucial role in seed dispersal of many plant species, because they usually store large quantities of intact seeds in the soil at many caches [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
There was a significant interaction between the linear term in seed size and energy content (Table 1), and the positive coefficient showed that the slope between the probability of seed harvest and its energy content is larger for large-sized seeds
The negative interactive effect between the quadratic term in seed size and energy content indicated that the quadratic effect of seed size on seed harvest was much stronger for low-energy seeds (Fig. 2A, Fig. S2)
Summary
Scatter-hoarding rodents are known to play a crucial role in seed dispersal of many plant species, because they usually store large quantities of intact seeds in the soil at many caches [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. When scatter-hoarding rodents encounter a seed, they usually face several sequential options: harvest vs ignore the seed; if they choose to harvest, eat in situ or move it to elsewhere; upon removal, decide on the removal distance, and whether to eat or cache the removed seed [9] Basic seed traits, such as seed size [4,10,11,12], seed geometry [13,14], chemical content [13,15,16,17,18], energy/nutrient content [5,12,19,20], and germination schedule [16,21], are believed to be essential factors during these important foraging processes. Seed size was positively correlated to the distance of seed removal by rodents [19,31,32]
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