As Seed-Dispersing Animals Go Extinct, Odds Of Plants Keeping Pace With Warming Fall 60%

[hatrack]

Animals that eat fruit and spread the seeds in their droppings offer an all-inclusive transportation service for half the world’s flora. But as more seed-dispersing birds and mammals die off globally, some of these plant species will lose their ability to shift their locations to keep pace with escalating climate change, says new research.

“When you hear the headlines about the biodiversity crisis, some call it the sixth mass extinction, that decline of birds and mammals also means the decline of seed dispersers,” Evan Fricke, lead author of the new study, recently published in Science, said.

Fricke and colleagues reported that the loss of birds and mammals has reduced the ability of animal-dispersed plants to track climate change by 60%. This number “is somewhere in the alarm bell territory,” he said. “I hope [this finding] focuses people’s attention on the importance of seed-disperser biodiversity for plant adaptation to climate change.” “If there are no animals available to eat their fruits or carry away their nuts,” Fricke said in a press release, “animal-dispersed plants aren’t moving very far.”

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The scientists also found that even just a small decline in the number of animal species leads to a massive decline in plants’ ability to track climate change. “One might expect that if a location loses 10% of its seed-dispersing animals, we would see a 10% decline in dispersal,” Fricke said, “but this is not the case.” When animals die off in an ecosystem, we’re often first losing the large ones — those that are the best at long-distance dispersal. “We found regions where climate-tracking seed dispersal declined by 95%, even though they’d lost only a few percent of their mammal and bird species,” Fricke said.

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https://therevelator.org/plants-climate-seed-dispersers/

[Botany]

1. When you lose any part of the ecosystem the other parts suffer too.

n/t