Getting from one place to another is a problem for a plant. One of the most efficient solutions to wrap seeds in an attractive, preferably tasty, envelope and so encourage gluttonous animals to transport therm. Wandering frugivores may thus become inadvertent vehicles of plant migration, but they could also find themselves the target of higher predators - so what then is the fate of the fruits? Is this where the story ends for the passively mobile plant? Apparently not. Work on fruit-eating lizards from the Canary Islands by Nogales, Delgado and Medina, reported in the Journal of Ecology, shows that viable seeds can be ingested by the predator with its prey and taken to further destinations, thus adding a new dimension to dispersal.

Peer reviewed