What is the preferred food type of a frugivore?
Frugivore Frugivore A frugivore is an animal that thrives mostly on raw fruits, succulent fruit-like vegetables, roots, shoots, nuts and seeds. It can be any type of herbivore or omnivore where fruit is a preferred food type. Because approximately 20% of all mammalian herbivores also eat fruit, frugivory is common among mammals. Since frugivores eat a lot of fruit, they are highly dependent on the abundance and nutritional composition of fruits. Frugivores can either benefit fruit-producing plants by dispersing seeds, or they can hinder plants by digesting seeds along with the fruits. When both the fruit-producing plant and the frugivore species
Frugivore dispersal allows plant species to disperse to other areas, the loss of frugivores could change plant communities and lead to the local loss of particular plant species. Since frugivore seed dispersal is so important in the tropics, many researchers have studied the loss of frugivores and related it to changed plant population dynamics. Several studies have noted that even the loss of only large frugivores (i.e. monkeys) could have a negative effect, since monkeys are responsible for certain types of long-distance seed dispersal that is not seen with other frugivore types, like birds. However, plant species whose seeds are dispersed