The fruits used included a range of fruit types but particularly species with large fleshy fruit.
All seeds were processed on the day of collection; in the case of species with fleshy fruit, seeds were removed from the fruit and washed.
Second, we chose species to include six with fleshy fruits and animaldispersed seeds, and six with dry fruits and primarily wind-dispersed seeds.
Only two of the four stem twiners have bird-dispersed, fleshy fruit.
This may be due to the large number of seeds produced compared to fleshy fruits as discussed earlier.
There is no doubt that the presence of a fleshy pericarp is inhibitory to seed germination in some plants.
One possibility is that loss of the fleshy cheek facilitated a wider gape.
A high number of seeds from fleshy-fruited species are dispersed to pastures by both birds and bats.