Tiny Plants May Ride on the Feathers of Migratory Birds for Thousands of Miles

Plants can occur in widely separated areas--from the farthest reaches of North America to the southern tip of South America, but nowhere in between. Yet exactly how or why this occurs has long remained a mystery. Now, scientists have found that migratory birds may be the explanation.

Recently, researchers have discovered that North and South distributions of certain plants will often result from a single jump across the tropics. This is at odds with the usual, gradual movements of plants over the course of ecological events. Because of this jump, scientists suspected that birds might play a role. That's why they looked at the phenomenon a bit more closely.

The researchers collected feathers from migratory birds in the field and then used microscopes to examine them. They found a total of 23 plant fragments trapped in the feathers of long-distance migratory birds about to leave for South America. More importantly, these scientists believed that all of the fragments had the potential to grow into new plants, and thus establish new plant populations.

"We really had no idea what we might find," said Emily Behling, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Each feather was like a lottery ticket, and as we got further into the project I was ecstatic about how many times we won."

In addition to these fragments, the researchers also found spores and other things that could help explain the distribution of cyanobacteria, fungi and algae.

"Mosses are especially abundant and diverse in the far Northern and Southern reaches of the Americas, and relative to other types of plants, they commonly occur in both of these regions, yet they have been largely overlooked by scientists studying this extreme distribution," said Lily Lewis, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Mosses can help to illuminate the processes that shape global biodiversity."

The findings are published in the journal PeerJ.