啮齿动物的分散贮食行为

Scatter-hoarding Behavior of Rodents

食物贮藏是许多动物重要的适应性行为,分散贮藏的食物以植物种子为主。每个贮藏点贮藏数量不等的食物项目。啮齿动物分散贮藏食物之后,可降低食物被其他个体获取的机率,提高对食物资源的控制能力,最终有利于自身的生存和繁殖成功。植物种子被贮藏之后,可减少非贮食鼠类对种子的取食。同时,合适的微生境和埋藏有利于种子萌发、幼苗建成和植物的更新;使植物的分布区得以扩展。探讨啮齿动物的分散贮食行为,能够更好地理解食物贮藏在啮齿动物生活史中的作用,进一步认识鼠类和植物的相互关系以及不同啮齿动物在群落形成中的潜在作用。本文综述了啮齿动物分散贮食的研究进展,并提出今后工作中的几点建议。

Food hoarding for future use is suggested to be an important adaptive behavior for many animals. Caches are distributed in wide variety of ways, from highly clumped to highly dispersed. The extreme of this spectrum of cache-dispersion have been termed larder hoarding and scatter hoarding. Scatter hoarding means that the caches made by rodents distributed in a widely spaced pattern, and that small quantities of food items, usually seeds of different plant species, were stored in each cache. Based on experimental and field studies, four hypotheses were proposed to explain why animal employ the strategy of scatter-hoarding: non-adaptive hypothesis, lack of space hypothesis, pilfering-avoidance hypothesis and rapid-sequestering hypothesis. Rodents benefit from scatter-hoarding because of the decreased probability of seed-consumed by other intra- and inter-specific individuals. The benefit will favor rodents' survival over the period of food scarcity in winter, and thus facilitate their reproductive success. On the other hand, plant species gain some advantages from scatter hoarding by rodents: 1) seeds predation by non-hoarding animals was decreased; 2) seeds have been transported to safe sites where are suitable to germination and 3) the regeneration of plants will be promoted and the distribution of plants will spread eventually. In the future, more attention should be paid on the food hoarding behavior of key species inhibited in different areas and on the factors influencing food hoarding behavior of rodents. Only those being done, can we understand better the interaction and mutualism and co-evolution between rodents and plant species.