About 88 million years ago, Madagascar separated from India.
Isolated from all other masses of land, plants and animals evolved in seclusion, creating a biodiversity access point unlike any other place on earth. A way in which biodiversity is propagated is by endozochorywhich is the name of the process for animals that eat plant seeds and then strengthen them elsewhere, which can make them grow in the new location. Birds are an obvious mode of transport, but a new study analyzes the role that lizard poop has played.
Lizards are not a typical choice of choice because they are rarely frugivoros eating fruits, nuts and seeds. Only 10 percent of known species do that. Three of them, the giant Malgache chameleon, the Cuvier swift, and the western tight lizard in Madagascar, were the recent issue of behavioral observations, fecal analysis and seed germination tests.
A giant chameleon Malgache (Furcifer Ostaleti) hits a superhero pose in the Madagascar almond tree (Boivinii Terminalia). Credit: Kyotou / Ryobu Fukuyama
The scholars found that the lizards consumed fruits of more than 20 species of viable plants and seeds expelled and the species of plants were largely different from those typically consumed by the common brown lemur, a main disperser of seeds in Madagascar forests, indicating that the lizards can play a novel role in biodiversity.
Citation: Fukuyama, R., Noyori, W., Tagane, S., Iyoda, S. and Sato, H. (2025), Frugivory for three species of lizards in Madagascar: involvement for their ecological roles such as seed dispersers. Biotropic, 57: E70052. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.70052
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