%0 Journal Article %A CAO Lin %A GUO Cong %T Effectiveness of small rodents dispersing seeds of Castanopsis indica in Xishuangbanna tropical seasonal rain forest %D 2011 %R %J ACTA THERIOLOGICA SINICA %P 323-329 %V 31 %N 4 %X

The effectiveness of Castanopsis indica seed dispersal was studied in the tropical rain forest in the Xishuangbanna region, Yunnan Province, China. We experimentally tracked the fate of 600 tagged nuts of C. indica under three focal trees (200 nuts for each tree) each year from November 2007 to November 2009. We investigated the proportion of experimental nuts moved away from the seed stations, the proportion of cached nuts buried beneath leaf litter or in soil, the number of nuts per cache, the distance that nuts were transported, and finally the proportion of nut surviving after being removed by rodents. Our results show that 69. 3% of the tagged C. indica nuts under focal trees were dispersed by rodents, 18% of which were cached. All cached nuts were buried beneath leaf litter or in soil,and most caches contained only one

nut, which may benefit nuts germination and seedling establishment. The dispersal distance of cached nuts averaged 7.1 m, ranging from 0.5 to 43.8 m, and there was no significant difference in distance variation among these three years. No nut survived to the end of the experiments in 2007 (when seeds were less abundant and rodents were more abundant), whereas 0.3% and 1. 5% nuts survived to the end of the experiments in 2008 and 2009 (years with high seed abundance and fewer rodents). Overall, our results suggest that rodents are effective dispersers of C. indica, but the dispersal effectiveness is largely dependent on the relative abundances of rodents and available seeds. %U http://www.mammal.cn/EN/abstract/article_2837.shtml