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.