Lecture 4

SEED DISPERSAL

What is a seed?
‘A seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective outer covering’.
A seed contains an embryo embedded in an endosperm (nutritious tissue). It contains an immature plant and
everything it needs to sprout in a new location, become established, and eventually grow into an adult plant.
Without seeds, forests would not be able to regenerate. Forests are important because they provide many
ecological services such as clean air and clean water, and they provide us with many valuable products such as
wood and food.
Seed Dispersal: “The movement or transport of seeds away from the parent plant”.
Seed dispersal is the movement, spread or transport of seeds away from the parent plant. Plants have very
limited mobility and consequently rely upon a variety of dispersal vectors to transport their propagules,
including both abiotic vectors such as the wind and living (biotic) vectors like birds. The patterns of seed
dispersal are determined in large part by the dispersal mechanism and this has important implications for the
demographic and genetic structure of plant populations, as well as migration patterns and species interactions.
There are five main modes of seed dispersal: gravity, wind, ballistic (explosive dehiscence of the fruit),
water, and by animals. Some plants are serotinous and only disperse their seeds in response to an
environmental stimulus. Serotiny is an ecological adaptation exhibited by some seed plants, in which seed
release occurs in response to an environmental trigger, rather than spontaneously at seed maturation e.g., fire
Why do seeds need to disperse?
All plants need water, sun, and space in order to grow. A seed cannot get the things it needs to grow if it falls
immediately below its parent because its parent is already using the resources in that location. Therefore, seeds
need to get to a new location in order to find the resources necessary for growth. This relocation is called
dispersal. Seeds lack the fundamental structures and innovations animals use to move from one place to another,
such as legs or wings. As such, seeds evolved different strategies for dispersing to new locations.
Benefits
Seed dispersal is likely to have several benefits for different plant species.
1. First, seed survival is often higher away from the parent plant. This higher survival may result from the
actions of density-dependent seed and seedling predators and pathogens, which often target the high
concentrations of seeds beneath adults. Competition with adult plants may also be lower when seeds are
transported away from their parent.
2. Seed dispersal also allows plants to reach specific habitats that are favourable for survival, a hypothesis
known as directed dispersal. For example, Ocotea endresiana (Lauraceae) is a tree species from Latin
America which is dispersed by several species of birds, including the three-wattled bellbird. Male bellbirds
perch on dead trees in order to attract mates, and often defecate seeds beneath these perches where the seeds
have a high chance of survival because of high light conditions and escape from fungal pathogens. In the
case of fleshy-fruited plants, seed-dispersal in animal guts (endozoochory) often enhances the amount, the
speed, and the asynchrony of germination, which can have important plant benefits.
3. Seeds dispersed by ants (myrmecochory) are not only dispersed short distances but are also buried
underground by the ants. These seeds can thus avoid adverse environmental effects such as fire or drought,
reach nutrient-rich microsites and survive longer than other seeds. These features are peculiar to
myrmecochory, which may thus provide additional benefits not present in other dispersal modes.
4. Finally, at another scale, seed dispersal may allow plants to colonize vacant habitats and even new
geographic regions.
Types of dispersal
Autochory: dispersed by plant own means
Gravity: heavier fruits cause them to fall and sometimes later be dispersed by water or animals
Allochory: through external means
Wind (anemochory) –seeds can float on a breeze or flutter to the ground
Water –seeds can travel long distances
Animals – (Zoochory): On the exterior of animal (fur)
Ingestion (Endoochory) –mechanism for most tree species (mostly by birds & mammals)
Seed predators –squirrels and birds hoard seeds in caches where they can grow humans –shoes, clothes, cars,
ships can lead to invasive species control biological populations
Consequences of Seed Dispersal
• Seed dispersal has many consequences for the ecology and evolution of plants. Dispersal is necessary for
species migrations.
• Dispersal is also predicted to play a major role in the origin and maintenance of species diversity. For
example, myrmecochory increased the rate of diversification more than twofold in plant groups in which it
 Lecture 4

has evolved because myrmecochorous lineages contain more than twice as many species as their non-
myrmecochorous sister groups (elaiosome).
• In addition, the speed and direction of wind are highly influential in the dispersal process and in turn the
deposition patterns of floating seeds in the stagnant water bodies. The transportation of seeds is led by the
wind direction. This effects colonization situated on the banks of a river or to wetlands adjacent to streams
relative to the distinct wind directions. The wind dispersal process can also effect connections between
water bodies. Essentially, wind plays a larger role in the dispersal of waterborne seeds in a short period of
time, days and seasons, but the ecological process allows the process to become balanced throughout a
time of several years. The period of which the dispersal occurs is essential when considering the
consequences of wind on the ecological process.