Almeida Bia A, Costea Mihai, Silva Giliandro G, Maltchik Leonardo, De La Cruz Susan E W, Takekawa John Y, Green Andy J
Department of Conservation Biology and Global Change, Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientifícas (CSIC), 41092 Sevilla, Spain.
Department of Biology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada.
Plants (Basel). 2025 Jun 26;14(13):1964. doi: 10.3390/plants14131964.
There are few studies on the extent to which waterfowl select plant food compared with what is available in wetland ecosystems. We used a new dataset on the presence of seeds in the alimentary canal or feces to identify flowering plant species whose seeds are ingested by North American ducks or geese. These data are a proxy for dispersal interactions because an important fraction of ingested seeds survives gut passage and is dispersed by endozoochory. We compared the plant traits of species whose seeds were ingested with those of species on the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Wetland Plants List (NWPL). Using a global dataset on plant form and function and chi-squared tests, we compared four categorical traits (moisture requirements, growth form, plant height, and seed mass) between species whose seeds are ingested by North American ducks and geese with the NWPL. Our analyses identified significant differences between the trait distributions of plants whose seeds were ingested by waterfowl guilds and those of the NWPL. Geese and ducks (except whistling ducks) ingested more aquatic and semiaquatic plant species than expected from the NWPL. All guilds except sea ducks ingested more herbaceous graminoids and fewer shrubs or trees than expected. Diving ducks interacted with fewer of the taller plants (>5 m) than expected, but otherwise plant height distributions did not differ from those expected. All waterfowl guilds ingested more species of intermediate seed size (1-10 mg) and fewer species of the smallest (<0.1 mg) or largest (>100 mg) size categories than expected. These results help to explain the role of the long-distance dispersal of seeds by migratory waterfowl in plant biogeography and how plant distributions are likely to respond to global change.
与湿地生态系统中可获取的植物食物相比，关于水禽对植物食物的选择程度的研究较少。我们使用了一个关于消化道或粪便中种子存在情况的新数据集，来确定其种子被北美鸭或鹅摄入的开花植物物种。这些数据是扩散相互作用的一个代理指标，因为摄入种子的很大一部分能在肠道通过后存活下来，并通过内果皮传播实现扩散。我们将其种子被摄入的物种的植物特征与美国农业部国家湿地植物名录（NWPL）中的物种特征进行了比较。利用一个关于植物形态和功能的全球数据集以及卡方检验，我们比较了北美鸭和鹅摄入其种子的物种与NWPL之间的四个分类特征（水分需求、生长形态、株高和种子质量）。我们的分析确定了水禽类群摄入其种子的植物的特征分布与NWPL的特征分布之间存在显著差异。鹅和鸭（除了啸鸭）摄入的水生和半水生植物物种比NWPL预期的更多。除海鸭外的所有类群摄入的草本禾本科植物更多，而灌木或乔木比预期的更少。潜水鸭与高于预期高度（>5米）的植物的相互作用比预期的少，但除此之外，株高分布与预期没有差异。所有水禽类群摄入的中等种子大小（1 - 10毫克）的物种比预期的更多，而最小（<0.1毫克）或最大（>100毫克）大小类别的物种比预期的更少。这些结果有助于解释迁徙水禽在植物生物地理学中种子长距离扩散的作用，以及植物分布可能如何应对全球变化。
