Animal litter

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The common thorn apple is one of the animal shakers. Its prickly fruits open and act like a scatter box.

As animal spreader is called ballepizoochore plants that a specific mechanism to spread their seed use. Animal litter is a special form of zoochory (spread via animals). A spreading mechanism similar to animal litter is wind scatter . Both propagation mechanisms are collectively referred to as semachory .

After flowering, the fruits or the fruit clusters that contain the seeds form. The opening fruits dry out with the ripening process ( xerochasia ) and open. If animals touch the stems on which the opened fruits are sitting, the stems move so that the mostly small and light seeds are scattered or detached. Many plants that use animal litter as a mechanism for their seeds to spread are therefore built so that they can easily come into contact with animals.

Often the animal litter also occurs in combination with epichory . The fruits of these plants often have a prickly or hooked surface, so that they can get caught in the fur of a passing animal, such as with burdock , clove root , thorn apple and henbane , where the fruits or entire fruit clusters are carried away, but also the virgin in the green in which only the seeds are scattered over the animals like from a litter box and carried on by them.

The animal spreaders differ from the animal ballists in that in the animal ballists the fruits or seeds are thrown away like a catapult by the action of passing animals, while in the animal spreaders they are only spread out of the fruit.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Distribution type according to Ruprecht Düll & Herfried Kutzelnigg 1986 (PDF; 13 MB), publications of the Geobotanical Institute of Eidg. Tech. Hochschule, Stiftung Rübel, in Zurich, Volume 125, 1995, on e-periodica.ch, accessed on September 25, 2018.