关键词: 啮齿动物, 分散贮藏, 贮藏点大小, 互惠关系

Abstract: Food hoarding for future use is suggested to be an important adaptive behavior for many animals. Caches are distributed in wide variety of ways, from highly clumped to highly dispersed. The extreme of this spectrumof cache-dispersion have been termed larder hoarding and scatter hoarding. Scatter hoarding means that the caches made by rodents distributed in a widely spaced pattern, and that small quantities of food items, usually seeds of different plant species, were stored in each cache. Based on experimental and field studies, four hypotheses were proposed to explain why animal employ the strategy of scatter-hoarding: non-adaptive hypothesis, lack of space hypothesis, pilfering-avoidance hypothesis and rapid-sequestering hypothesis. Rodents benefit from scatter-hoarding because of the decreased probability of seed-consumed by other intra-and inter-specific individuals. The benefit will favor rodents' survival over the period of food scarcity in winter, and thus facilitate their reproductive success. On the other hand, plant species gain some advantages from scatter hoarding by rodents: 1) seeds predation by non-hoarding animals was decreased; 2) seeds have been transported to safe sites where are suitable to germination and 3) the regeneration of plants will be promoted and the distribution of plants will spread eventually. In the future, more attention should be paid on the food hoarding behavior of key species inhibited in different areas and on the factors influencing food hoarding behavior of rodents. Only those being done, can we understand better the interaction and mutualism and co-evolution between rodents and plant species.

Key words: Rodents, Scatter hoarding, Cache size, Mutualism