Seed diseprsal by animals is an important ecological service.
How selective or general the animals are in their choice of
fruits to eat might have a huge effect on dispersal of the
plants. Read more in the new Early View paper “Individual
variation in resource use by opossums leading to nested fruit
consumption” by Mauricio Cantor et al. Here is the authors’ own
summary of the paper: Seed dispersal by fruit-eating vertebrates
is an important ecological service that has consequences for the
plant community and regeneration process. Despite recent
findings on the ecological relevance of within population diet
variation far less attention has been devoted to the role diet
variation for ecological services, such as seed dispersal. In
this paper we unravel fruit consumption patterns by the white-
eared opossum (Didelphis albiventris), a South American
didelphid, which is regarded as an important seed disperser
commonly found in disturbed environments, where vegetal
regeneration is especially required. We detected f