Deer as horticulturists?

Right now, my whole hometown is ‘hunt crazy’; most men (and some women) have hunting on their minds and cannot focus on anything else.  November 1st to 13th is the rifle deer hunt, so everyone – including myself – is chatting with their hunting group; discussing which days, times, places, and ammo that might provide the best chances in bagging a big buck.



Frank the deer at QUBS

 For these two weeks, deer are viewed as nothing but a potentially delicious dinner, via sausages, pepperettes, steaks, and roasts.  Unfortunately, most hunters don’t stop to think about the importance of these creatures in the local ecosystem.  Deer can actually alter the forest composition at many levels (i.e. populations, communities) throughout their range; they act as vectors of seed dispersal of many plants.  This can occur in several ways: epizoochory (i.e. seeds get caught and transported in fur), zoochory (i.e. seeds move along animal pathways or are trampled into the dirt), and endozoochory (i.e. seeds are ingested and eliminated somewhere else). 

These phenomena often go unnoticed; if the seeds being transported belong to a locally common plant species, changes in surrounding distributions will not be noticeable (although genetic diversity can increase).  However, if the transported seeds belong to a new and/or invasive species, deer can facilitate frequency and distribution growth quickly.