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When rivers in the Amazon Basin flood into surrounding forests and savannas, a fruit-eating fish called a tambaqui proves itself a champion at excreting seeds in distant new homes, says Jill T. Anderson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In extreme cases, seeds hitchhiking with the fish can land almost 5.5 kilometers [3 miles] from the mother tree.
Those distances put the tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum) into the ranks of elephants and big birds for long-distance planting, Anderson and her colleagues report in an upcoming Proceedings of the Royal Society B. |
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In tree reproduction, distance matters, especially as loggers, farmers and builders clear more and more patches of forest. Fruit-eaters are “the mobile links that keep forest fragments connected,” says ecologist Pedro Jordano of the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain. Otherwise patches could become so isolated they lose healthful genetic diversity.
Biologists have begun to gather evidence on how much impact a seed-courier fish might have on a terrestrial forest. The tambaqui, also called a gamitana, is one of roughly 200 known fruit-eating fish species worldwide and gets its chance to forage in the floodplains where rivers swell over their banks and cover some 250,000 square kilometers [100,000 square miles] for months each year. “In some places, you can canoe in the tree canopy,” Anderson says. |
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