Central American Agouti

Jansen, P.A., Hirsch, B.T., Emsens, W.-J., Zamora-Gutierrez, V., Wikelski, M. et Kays, R.W. (2012). Thieving rodents as substitute dispersers of megafaunal seeds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(31), 12610–12615.

By fitting 500 palm seeds with miniature radio tags, the authors tracked their fate on Barro Colorado Island: each seed was moved an average of 8 times by different agoutis stealing from each other's caches, and 35% ended up more than 100 m from the parent tree. This relay of theft and re-caching replaces, through small cumulative steps, the long-distance transport once provided by now-extinct megafauna — without any single agouti needing to carry the seed the whole way.

Gálvez, D. et Hernández, M. (2022). Ecology of fear and its effect on seed dispersal by a neotropical rodent. Behavioral Ecology, arac008.

The authors first observed that dispersal and pilferage of Attalea butyracea seeds were lower at sites perceived to have high ocelot density, particularly during the rainy season when food is more abundant — then confirmed the effect with a controlled experiment exposing agoutis to ocelot urine and feces. It is the behavioral mechanism — fear altering foraging behavior — that is demonstrated; the study does not quantify the reduction as a percentage.