Repeated radicle pruning of acornsQuercus mongolica as a cache management tactic of Siberian chipmunks

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	Repeated radicle pruning of acornsQuercus mongolica as a cache management tactic of Siberian chipmunks
	Xianfeng Yi
	2011-06-21
发表期刊	acta ethologica
ISSN	0873-9749
摘要	Many rodents hoard seeds as a means of ensuring food availability during scarcity. Siberian chipmunks (Tamias sibiricus) feed on acorns of white oak Quercus mongolica and hoard them for future use. Such caches may deteriorate due to the early germination of the acorns in autumn, which can be inhibited by radicle pruning or embryo excision.Siberian chipmunks are found to frequently prune the radicles of germinated acorns of Q. mongolica;however,whether this behavior is a kind of cache management tactic remains unclear. Here, we performed semi-natural enclosure and field experiments to test the role of radicle pruning in cache management of T. sibiricus. We found that T. sibiricus preferrednon-germinatedacornsandtendedtopruneradicles of germinating acorns when scatter-hoarding them, but did not perform the behavior of embryo excision by squirrels.Both semi-natural enclosure and field experiments showed that T. sibiricus not only pruned radicles repeatedly but removed radicles varied in length from acorns, which significantly postponed acorn germination and radicle growth. These observations suggest that radicle pruning would be an evolutionary tactic for cache management of Siberian chipmunks.
收录类别	SCI
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://210.75.249.4/handle/363003/2182
专题	中国科学院西北高原生物研究所
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Xianfeng Yi. Repeated radicle pruning of acornsQuercus mongolica as a cache management tactic of Siberian chipmunks[J]. acta ethologica,2011.
APA	Xianfeng Yi.(2011).Repeated radicle pruning of acornsQuercus mongolica as a cache management tactic of Siberian chipmunks.acta ethologica.
MLA	Xianfeng Yi."Repeated radicle pruning of acornsQuercus mongolica as a cache management tactic of Siberian chipmunks".acta ethologica (2011).

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