Month: March 2007

Field course on Frugivory and Seed Dispersal finished

Curso de Frugivoria em Ilha de Cardoso, SP, Brazil

The 2007 edition of the field course on Frugivory and Seed Dispersal finished. We had an excellent time at Ilha de Cardoso. Not many ripe fruits of palmito juçara (Euterpe edulis) this year but we carried out lots of focal watches at Symplocos trees and other species. As ever, a fantastic experience with a great group students, mainly brazilian this year. We had José María Gómez (Rocka) and Rodolfo Dirzo as invited professors, joining Mauro, Wesley, Marco Aurélio and myself.

New paper on seed dispersal by animal frugivores in PNAS

New paper in PNAS just published

We have just published our paper “Jordano, P., C. García, J.A. Godoy, and J.L. García-Castaño. 2007. Differential contribution of frugivores to complex seed dispersal patterns. Proceedings National Academy of Sciences USA, 104: 3278-3282”. These are great news since it represents a great advance in the analysis of frugivore-created seed shadows. We document the differential contribution of different frugivore groups to seeds dispersed a given distance, using direct assignement procedires based on DNA genotyping methods. At the moment it’s the first approximation we have available to the total dispersal kernel of a plant species.
The paper has been extensively commented in the ‘Perspectives in Science’ section of Science journal. Please see the publications list for details.