With 40 total clearings, the scale of the experiment can best be appreciated from the air. As seen from a plane flying at several thousand feet, each one of the eight sites looks more like a large crop circle or alien launch pad than a biology experiment. From a satellite, the arrangement of eight total sites is even more impressive.
Created in 1999, the clearings quickly grew into fields. These habitat "patches" provided what Levey called "black and white" habitat types when compared with the forest plants and animals found in the fields would never flourish in the forest and vice versa. Research on the sites lasted for two years, with most data collected in 2000 and 2001.
For one of two major experiments, the researchers planted male holly bushes in the central patch and female hollies in the four peripheral patches. They chose holly because it is not naturally present in the forest and the female trees cannot bear fruit unless pollinated by males. The researchers waited until the hollies had flowered and then measured the fruit set, or the percentage of flowers that turned into berries, in each of the clearings.
The result: The hollies in the connected patches were consistently more fruitful than in the unconnected ones. This indicated that more wasps, butterflies and other insect pollinators made it from each central patch through the corridor than through the forest.
When birds or other animals eat fruits, they often distribute the seeds to new locations in their droppings, an important mechanism of plant dispersal. To gauge the effects the corridors had on this process, the researchers marked thousands of seeds of wax myrtle and holly in the central patch with a sticky powder that can be seen only with a florescent light. The researchers then placed seed traps under 16 bird perches built in each of the connected and unconnected
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Contact: Josh Tewksbury
jtewksbury@zoo.ufl.edu
803-725-1769
University of Florida
16-Sep-2002