• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Forest Health Depends On The Personality Of Small Mammals

May 21, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Healthy ecosystems are known to require diversity, but a study from the forests of Maine reveals there’s an aspect of this ecologists have been overlooking: the personality of pollinators and seed dispersers. If the work proves applicable to other environments, it suggests that the richness and sustainability of the planet depends on having some animals that are brave and outgoing, and some that are more cautious. Sometimes this may be supplied by different species, but having a range of approaches among the same animal can work as well.

Advertisement

The old saying; “It takes all types to make the world” has received scientific verification. It’s not just a truism that the world we see reflects the range of personalities that exist, but also that the vibrancy and health of the planet depend on that variation. All this has been revealed by hiding pine seeds in caches in Penobscot Experimental Forest (PEF) for cute little critters to find.

Advertisement

As the name suggests, the PEF is preserved by the US Forest Service and the University of Maine for researchers to study, including exploring the consequences of interventions, not just pure observation. Graduate student Brigit Humphreys has been hiding caches of eastern white pine seeds to provide opportunities for so-called “pilferers”.

“The point of the project was to figure out how small mammal personality and animal personality in general influence different ecological processes,” Humphreys said in a statement. “We’re focused on small mammals because they’re a great study system. They’re abundant, we get a really good sample size and we can actually conduct experiments on them in the forest.”

In the short-term animals depend on trees and fungi for food, but in the longer run the relationship is symbiotic. Without animals to disperse their seeds or spores, most stationary organisms can’t colonize new territory, including taking back areas damaged by storms, fire, or human activity. There’s a reason so many fruits, nuts, and mushrooms tasted so good even before humans started selectively breeding them.

Although the importance of seed dispersal for healthy forests is well understood – and one of the reasons to fear the decline of large frugivores like elephants and lemurs  – Humphreys notes work has concentrated on the species, not the individual.

Advertisement

Seeking to change this, researchers trapped 3,311 squirrels, chipmunks, voles, shrews, and species of mice in six patches of the PEF and gave them personality tests. Not the small fluffy equivalent of Myers-Briggs, but tests with some actual science behind them, such as the tendency to explore new territory.

They then replaced the traps in an area with cameras and equipment to recognize the tags they had attached to their temporary captives. 

The cameras revealed deer mice should be your first pick if you’re putting together a pine seed cache raiding party, but that variation in personality within some species is at least as important. Every animal has to trade off the chance of finding food against the danger of getting eaten by a predator, and they don’t all find the same balance. Those with more exploratory personalities were more likely to find the caches, but so were those who were thinner for lack of food.

Although pilferers eat some of the seeds on the spot, they move and rebury others, usually taking them further from the parental tree and playing an important role in increasing seed dispersal. The recacher may die or forget the location, giving the seeds an opportunity to germinate. Undernourished cache-finders may be less use to the ecosystem, as they’re more likely to eat their discovery straight away, rather than rehide it.

Advertisement

Hiding your cache from other furry thieves is a hard task in the forests of Maine – 83.5 percent of the caches the team buried were pilfered within six nights.

Sometimes the same seed is recached several times by different creatures, achieving dispersal over a far wider range than would occur if every animal stuck to finding its own. Pilferage is so common that animals will look for less trafficked spots to store their seeds where others will not find them. 

Consequently, enthusiastic pilferers enhance seed dispersal not just through their own efforts, but by making others go further afield to try to stop them. If predators catch all the bolder pilferers, it can diminish this pressure and lead to a more uniform and less resilient forest.

“The take-home message of all the research we are doing is that individuals are important,” Humphreys said. “There’s a big push in the science community to conserve biodiversity, but beyond biodiversity, we have to be conserving behavioral diversity within a species if we truly want to have fully functional ecosystems.”

Advertisement

Some may wish to extrapolate the conclusion to humans, arguing we need a variety of approaches to create a society that resembles a stable ecosystem, not a vulnerable monoculture – something schools and other institutions may need occasionally reminding of.

The study is published open access in the Journal of Animal Ecology 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-NZ players reach Dubai after ‘specific, credible threat’ derailed Pakistan tour
  2. Soccer-Liverpool’s Alexander-Arnold ruled out of Man City game
  3. What Are Baby Platypuses Called?
  4. Should You Wash Chicken Before Cooking It?

Source Link: Forest Health Depends On The Personality Of Small Mammals

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Impact That Made Meteor Crater May Have Triggered Giant Grand Canyon Landslide
  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version