Agouti SNAX™

I only have a couple days left of data collection here in Las Cruces, but I thought I would write a little post about the Agouti SNAX ™ (artificial fruits) that I made and am using in my experiments.

The idea behind the SNAX ™  was to create a food item that agoutis would recognize as edible and treat like a real fruit/seed.  Because I can make these SNAX ™  any shape and size, I can experimentally manipulate this variable and see how (e.g.) seed size affects agouti seed dispersal effectiveness (the distance they remove seeds from a source) and hoarding behavior (do agoutis preferentially hoard large seeds far away over small seeds?).  No one has ever tried making artificial fruits like these before to answer these fundamental questions.

Making the SNAX ™  was pretty fun, but time-consuming.  I used Sculpey clay (terra cotta color) into which I incorporated a fixed ratio of ground-up peanuts (shells and nuts).  Each large fruit is made of 21 g of clay and 4 g of peanuts inside (= 25 g total) while each small fruit comprises 3.5 g of clay and 0.5 g of peanut inside (= 4 g total).

I am very excited that the agoutis here in Las Cruces really enjoy eating these SNAX ™ and treat them no differently than other fruits they find in nature -- this trip has been a success!  Carlos and I plan to come back to Las Cruces in the near future to elaborate on this experiment and do some beetle/leaf herbivory work too!