La Selva -- artificial fruit experiment

Carlos' and my time here at La Selva is winding down (we head south to Las Cruces, near the Panama border, on Thursday the 28th) and so are our two experiments. My experiment focuses on the evolution of seed size and how terrestrial mammal seed dispersers may influence seed survival through differential dispersal of seeds varying in size.

To explicitly address this question, I created artificial fruits and tracked their fates over time. Initially I used peanuts in my artificial fruit (or SNAX) recipe, but the peccaries here hated them -- they took one whiff of the peanut-flavored SNAX and ran away! Weird.

After that, I used seeds from fruiting native Dipteryx panamensis trees in the SNAX. I conducted some feeding trials (which is fancy science speak for "I threw artificial fruits at peccaries to see if they would eat them") and the peccaries really liked the Dipteryx-flavored fruits.

I deployed 9 depots (10 seeds each: 5 small and 5 large) with camera traps to detect dispersers. After about 20 days of exposure in the field, however, I had very few animals interact with the seeds. I think there are just too many fruits available right now and the peccaries are being very choosy, bypassing my SNAX. Bleh, that's how it goes sometimes.

I know that this experiment works really well with the agoutis in Las Cruces and there are just not enough agoutis here to make this project work. I scrapped the SNAX project here at La Selva and I am instead collaborating on an exciting project with Carlos. This project involves beetles, plants, and spa treatments. I will elaborate more about that in another post!