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 32 Liomys and Enterolobium DHJanzen100554.jpg high resolution
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| The fruit on the left has had all of its seeds taken by Liomys, right where the fruit lay below the parent tree. The mouse is just beginning on the fruit on the right. The mouse is (apparently) not interested at all in what attracts the megafauna - the fruit tissue. So, it becomes a sort of irregular race between the megafauna and the mice. And with very low density of both, the fruits lie below the parent tree until they rot with the coming rainy season rains. The seeds do germinate there, but the seedlings are killed by the seedling-eating fungus that inhabits the soil directly below each reproductive-age Enterolobium, a fungus whose population is undoubtedly kept big and healthy by the seedlings from missed seeds (though one could imagine a combination of many mice and many megafauna keeping a fruit crop so thoroughly cleaned up year after year that the soil below the parent is not necessarily lethal - and in this case, then, the sapling would die of shade competition from the parent). | ||
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