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1 January 2020 Some Initial Observations Concerning the African Wild Banana Ensete ventricosum as a Resource for Vertebrates
Fredrick Ssali, Douglas Sheil
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Abstract

The ecological role and significance of “African wild bananas” Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman (Musaceae) are unknown. We considered if E. ventricosum, with its sustained flowering and fruiting, might act in some ways like a keystone species by supporting animal populations during periods of resource scarcity. We deployed camera traps facing flowers or fruits of E. ventricosum for a total of 40 camera months in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. We recorded 1,691 visitor events by 11 vertebrate species to flowers and fruits (1,129 events by five species to flowers and 562 events by eight species to fruits); these visitors included potential pollinators and seed dispersers. Frequent visitors to flowers were the African dormouse Graphiurus murinus (53.3%), Nectar bat Megaloglossus woermanni (43.8%), and sunbirds (family Nectariniidae) (2.4%) while those to fruits were Carruther’s mountain squirrel Funisciurus carruthersi (54.1%), L'hoest's monkey Allochrocebus l’hoesti (18.7%), and Forest giant pouched rat Cricetomys emini (18.6%). Flower visitors were mainly nocturnal (with birds favoring dusk), while fruit visitors exhibited both diurnal and nocturnal activity patterns. The data indicate that by producing flowers and fruits continuously, E. ventricosum should support animal populations when other flower and fruit resources are scarce. We speculate that establishing these plants in degraded areas may facilitate forest resilience and recovery while providing fallback resources to many species. Such plant species are prime contenders for protection and restoration.

© The Author(s) 2019 Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Fredrick Ssali and Douglas Sheil "Some Initial Observations Concerning the African Wild Banana Ensete ventricosum as a Resource for Vertebrates," Tropical Conservation Science 12(1), (1 January 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1940082919879318
Received: 11 June 2019; Accepted: 9 September 2019; Published: 1 January 2020
KEYWORDS
Bwindi
Ensete ventricosum
fallback species
flowering phenology
Fruiting phenology
pollination
seed dispersal
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