LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Defaunation precipitates the extinction of evolutionarily distinct interactions in the Anthropocene

Photo from wikipedia

Defaunation erodes millions of years of evolutionary history of bird–seed dispersal interactions in human-modified landscapes. Species on Earth are interconnected with each other through ecological interactions. Defaunation can erode those… Click to show full abstract

Defaunation erodes millions of years of evolutionary history of bird–seed dispersal interactions in human-modified landscapes. Species on Earth are interconnected with each other through ecological interactions. Defaunation can erode those connections, yet we lack evolutionary predictions about the consequences of losing interactions in human-modified ecosystems. We quantified the fate of the evolutionary history of avian–seed dispersal interactions across tropical forest fragments by combining the evolutionary distinctness of the pairwise-partner species, a proxy to their unique functional features. Both large-seeded plant and large-bodied bird species showed the highest evolutionary distinctness. We estimate a loss of 3.5 to 4.7 × 104 million years of cumulative evolutionary history of interactions due to defaunation. Bird-driven local extinctions mainly erode the most evolutionarily distinct interactions. However, the persistence of less evolutionarily distinct bird species in defaunated areas exerts a phylogenetic rescue effect through seed dispersal of evolutionarily distinct plant species.

Keywords: distinct interactions; seed; bird; evolutionarily distinct; defaunation; evolutionary history

Journal Title: Science Advances
Year Published: 2019

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.