Plants require some mechanism if they're to migrate. That's a problem with deforestation and population declines in some mammals and birds,
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For decades scientists have been tracking which birds and other animals eat fruits and the seeds they contain, how far those seeds are transported and whether they germinate wherever they are deposited. These are what ecologists call mutualistic interactions. “The animal gets some fruit, and the plant gets to move,” Fricke explains. He says he has spent hours sitting in a hammock, eyes trained on a piece of fruit, to see which local birds stop by for a snack.
From examining specific ecosystems, such as the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, ecologists have concluded that the loss of birds and other animals from deforestation and other pressures has been curtailing trees’ ability to disperse their seeds. “But zooming out to the global scale, there hadn’t been an analysis,” Fricke says. So he and his colleagues “were going in trying to understand how big this problem is.”
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