Tree Species Robustness: Animals vs. Wind Dispersal

And evidently the winners are animals, according to a new report in last week's Science.

I am first impressed by this big number: they took 89,365 forest survey plots of 34 tree species. But since I don't know how difficult the methods are to enact, I don't actually know if that's impressive or not. On the other hand, it's in Science, it must be pretty impressive.

However, getting into the data, there are also other important numbers to consider: 12 species are wind dispersed and 22 are animal dispersed. Almost double the amount are animal dispersed? And when you look at their chart, 8 animal-dispersed species are filling out the well-dispersed end of the chart, but everything else seems pretty evenly matched. One animal-dispersed sits at the end of the chart pretty high above all the rest, and two wind-dispersed species sit in the middle, but within the range of most of the animal-dispersed species. So, if we had more wind-dispersal species, would we find them falling in the range of the higher-end animal-dispersal trees?

Perhaps part of the point is that there simply aren't more wind-dispersed trees of canopy-dominant trees, but that's not data.

Why am I talking about this on a blog about primates? Well, I got really excited about it to see if they could differentiate between the animal species dispersal, (say tell the difference between whether certain trees were dispersed by primates or birds or butterflies, etc) which could support or refute the Angiosperm theory of primate evolution. Before I got so excited, I should have recalled this paper which showed primates aren't species-specific dispersers, but diffuse dispersers.

Still a cool study though.