Endozoochory of the same community of plants lacking fleshy fruits by storks and gulls

Abstract

Aims: Research into the dispersal of plants lacking a fleshy fruit by avian endozoo-chory remains limited, particularly regarding the different roles of specific vectors in the same habitat.Methods: We compared plants dispersed by endozoochory between two migratory waterbirds differing in body size: the lesser black-backed gull Larus fuscus, and the white stork Ciconia ciconia. We collected faeces and pellets from roosting flocks on dykes in rice fields in Doñana, SW Spain, and extracted intact seeds.Results: We recovered 424 intact seeds from excreta, representing 21 plant taxa, 11 of which germinated under laboratory conditions. Eight plant species are con -sidered weeds, four of them as alien species, and only two have a fleshy fruit. Seed abundance and species richness per sample did not differ between storks and gulls. Toadrush (Juncus bufonius) was the dominant species, accounting for 49% of seeds recovered. PERMANOVA and mvabund analyses revealed no differences in the pro -portions of each plant species dispersed by the two vectors, and seasonal variation in abundance was absent. Overall, germinability was 19%, and declined with increasingdelay between sample collection and processing. Transects along dykes identified 52 plant taxa, only 18 of which were recorded in excreta.Conclusions: Overlap in the communities of non-fleshy-fruited plants dispersed by two unrelated birds of different size suggests that waterbird plant dispersal networks are different from frugivore networks. Unlike for frugivores, decoupling between seed production and ingestion reduces seasonal variation in endozoochory rates. For Juncus bufonius and other plants, these avian vectors provide maximum dispersal distances several orders of magnitude greater than predicted from their dispersal syndromes. Endozoochory by migratory waterbirds has major implications for plant distributions in a rapidly changing world, and more research is required before we can predict which plants disperse regularly via this mechanism.