Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
node · earth · Neotropical forest, including the Amazon Basin
A diurnal caviomorph rodent of the neotropical forest floor, the size of a small dog, and the single link on which Brazil nut regeneration hangs. It is one of the very few animals capable of gnawing through the woody capsule that encloses the seeds, and it does not simply eat them: it scatter-hoards, burying seeds singly at distance from the parent tree and retrieving most but not all of them. The seeds it forgets are the next generation of trees. The dependency runs in one direction and is therefore fragile in an asymmetric way - agoutis eat many things and would persist without Brazil nuts, while the tree has no alternative disperser at the scale it needs. Hunting pressure on agoutis and other large-bodied forest rodents thus registers in the Brazil nut population decades later, which is the kind of lag that makes ecological damage hard to attribute.
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Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 14 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related
- Story
- A diurnal caviomorph rodent of the neotropical forest floor, the size of a small dog, and the single link on which Brazil nut regeneration hangs. It is one of the very few animals capable of gnawing through the woody capsule that encloses the seeds, and it does not simply eat them: it scatter-hoards, burying seeds singly at distance from the parent tree and retrieving most but not all of them. The seeds it forgets are the next generation of trees. The dependency runs in one direction and is therefore fragile in an asymmetric way - agoutis eat many things and would persist without Brazil nuts, while the tree has no alternative disperser at the scale it needs. Hunting pressure on agoutis and other large-bodied forest rodents thus registers in the Brazil nut population decades later, which is the kind of lag that makes ecological damage hard to attribute.
- Knowledge
- Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
- Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
- Connections
- Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
- Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
- Amazon Basin
- Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
- Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
- Indigenous Peoples and Demarcated Territories of the Amazon
- Evidence
- Supports the finding that persistently overharvested Brazil nut stands lack juvenile recruitment and are therefore not demographically sustainable despite producing well in the present. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the number of stands sampled and the countries surveyed are described approximately.
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