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Which acorns get eaten?
They look like miniature BBQ grills, set up beneath
many campus trees. These mysterious objects are
seed traps, part of a research project organized by
graduate student Leila Hadj-Chikh of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology, who is studying "the
relationship between oak regeneration and the
foraging behavior of gray squirrels."
Folk wisdom dictates that
"Great oaks from little acorns grow" -- but only if
the acorn gets safely buried in the earth so that
it can germinate. And acorns get buried "by
squirrels caching them for future meals,"
Hadj-Chikh points out. Squirrels, of course, cache
acorns for their own dining pleasure, not to aid in
oak regeneration; and oaks drop acorns to make more
oak trees, not to feed squirrels. But between them,
both oaks and squirrels flourish.
"The reproductive
strategies of plants may influence or be influenced
by the cache-recovery behavior of seed hoarders,"
Hadj-Chikh observes. "If patterns of cache recover
are correlated with genetically-based seed
characteristics, such as size, then cache recovery
may represent an important stage of seed
selection." (Photo: Susan Geller)
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