Date: April 4, 2019
Source: University of Illinois College of
Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
On the
Hawaiian island of Oahu, it is possible to stand in a lush tropical forest that
doesn't contain a single native plant. The birds that once dispersed native
seeds are almost entirely gone too, leaving a brand-new ecological community
composed of introduced plants and birds. In a first-of-its-kind study published
today in Science, researchers demonstrate that these novel communities are
organized in much the same way as native communities worldwide.
The
discovery comes after an exhaustive examination of bird diets across Oahu and a
subsequent network analysis describing bird-plant interactions on the island.
Unexpectedly, the analysis showed introduced birds have developed complex
patterns of interactions with plants, most of them non-native to the island.
And when bird-plant interactions in Oahu were compared to native-dominated
ecosystems around the world, they were strikingly similar.
"These
birds on Oahu aren't interacting with these invasive plants randomly. They're
actually selecting certain plants. What's interesting about this is that these
birds didn't co-evolve with these plants. We think of specialization as a
co-evolved trait that develops over millennia, but we are seeing it in
completely novel ecosystems and in species that have only lived together for
less than 100 years," says Jinelle Sperry, wildlife biologist for the U.S.
Army Engineer Research and Development Center, adjunct professor in the
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at the
University of Illinois, and co-author on the Science study.
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