Study shows that birds’ preference for rare fruits is important for maintaining biodiversity.
As Fruit-eating birds prefer rare fruits. And this preference plays a fundamental role in maintaining diversity of plants.
The international project was led by the Functional Ecology Center (CFE) of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC). Data were collected systematically throughout 12 years old, in a forest in Coimbra.
It’s the first empirical evidence that the tendency of birds to supplement their diets with nutrients and rare fruits is an important mechanism to favor the dispersal of seeds of locally rare species, thus contributing to the maintaining biodiversity plant on a regional scale.
The researchers analyzed how the nutritional and energetic composition of fruits and the density of other plants influence the birds’ food choices and the services they provide in seed dispersal.
According to this analysis, frugivorous birds prefer rare fruits, with more distinct nutritional characteristics compared to their surroundings.
As plants benefit from the proximity of other fruit-bearing plants – can attract more seed-dispersing birds to the same area.
«This preference that birds have for eating rare fruits and dispersing their seeds shows the importance of interactions between species for plant diversity», Guadalupe Peralta, first author of the study.
«It is extraordinary that the simple fact that birds try to diversify their diet, consuming the rarest and strangest fruits they find, helps these plants not to be eliminated by more common and competitive ones. In a sense, this makes birds the defenders of the weak and oppressed in nature and caretakers of biodiversity», adds FCTUC researcher, Ruben Heleno.
