By Amy Weiss

Sep 26 2019

As more land is developed, plants have an increasingly difficult task of getting their seeds into new habitats. Luckily, some plants can rely on animals to do this job. For wetland plants, the daily movements of ducks seems to be crucial for maintaining the diversity of plants in wetlands, especially in highly fragmented landscapes.¹

Dabbling ducks, which includes the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), are omnivorous birds that feed extensively on plants and seeds. They ingest seeds, spores, and plant fragments from many species (that belong to a wide range of plant families) during their daily foraging trips, and excrete them later. Not all seeds make it through the digestive tract intact, but given the millions of ducks and the great quantity of seeds each duck eats every day, dabbling ducks are a very important means of dispersal for plants.²