Dispersal of Seeds by Animals

Animals of all sorts and sizes help plants to disperse their seeds. The method they use depends on the type of seed.

Seeds with attractive fruit or seeds

To attract the animals and birds and encourage them to act as seed carriers,plants often surround their seeds with a brightly-coloured and sweet-tasting pulp.

Raspberry Sea Grape Bilberry

In the deserts of North Africa, elephants eat the fruits that have fallen from the trees and deposit the seedsin their droppings several miles away. In South American jungles, monkeys eat figs and other fruit, carryingsome away in their stomachs and dropping others onto the ground. In Britain, foxes eat raspberries,squirrels eat nuts, blackbirds eat our strawberries, mice eat grass seeds, and in South Africa, even antscarry seeds into their nests, eat the tasty outer covering and leave the seeds to grow safely underground.

As well as eating them, some animals collect the fruits or seeds and bury them to eat later, but forgetabout them and the seeds germinate in their new location. Sometimes, as in the case of Mistletoe, theseeds are covered in a sticky slime which the birds rub off on a new tree. Even humans carry seeds faraway for plants - by taking an apple on a picnic, for example, and throwing the core, with its seeds, intothe bushes.

Examples of seeds spread by this method include:

Date Monstera Tamarind Lablab Diospiros Sunflower

Seeds with clinging hooks or spines

When animals take fruits or seeds for food, they act as willing transporters of the plant's seeds.Sometimes, the plants make use of animals to carry their seeds without giving them any reward.

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Entelia Lesser Burdock Sea Holly

Many plants produce fruits or individual seeds covered in hooks or spines which attach the seed to theanimals's fur or feathers - or, in the case of humans, to our clothes or bags. The seeds are then carried asufficient distance from the parent plant to give them space to grow. Eventually, the seed may fall off, or berubbed off by the animal.

The most well-known plant of this type that we have in the UK is probably Goose Grass or Sticky Weed,which children throw at one another in a game, but in other countries there are larger such hitch-hikerswhich can damage animals when they become lodged between the animal's toes and cause infection andlameness. There's more information about species in North and South America that produce large hookedor prickly seedpods here.

Examples of seeds spread by this method include:

Rambutan Bixa Trollius Cynoglossum Orlaya Eryngium

Back to the Seed Dispersal Main Page

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