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The Missing Part Of Seed Dispersal Networks: Structure And Robustness Of Bat-Fruit Interactions, Marco Aurelio Ribeiro Mello, Flávia Maria Darcie Marquitti, Paulo Roberto Guimarães Jr.

KIP Articles

Mutualistic networks are crucial to the maintenance of ecosystem services. Unfortunately, what we know about seed dispersal networks is based only on bird-fruit interactions. Therefore, we aimed at filling part of this gap by investigating bat-fruit networks. It is known from population studies that: (i) some bat species depend more on fruits than others, and (ii) that some specialized frugivorous bats prefer particular plant genera. We tested whether those preferences affected the structure and robustness of the whole network and the functional roles of species. Nine bat-fruit datasets from the literature were analyzed and all networks showed lower complementary specialization …