Things likely to remain intact in bird droppings are usually seeds or tough plant skins but findings published in the Journal of Biogeography, researchers from Tohoku University, Japan add snails to the list and even suggest that being eaten by birds could be a key factor in how the snail populations spread as one snail fed to a bird gave birth to juveniles just after passing through the gut.
Japanese white-eyes on the island of Hahajima, Japan feast on tiny land snails.
Researchers found that 15% of the snails eaten survived digestion and were found alive in the birds’ droppings.
This evidence suggests that bird predation could be a key factor in how snail populations spread.
Further study is required to find out whether the tiny snails have other adaptations that allow them to survive.
Hahajima lies 1000km south of Tokyo in the Bonin Islands archipelago, known as the Ogasawara Group in Japan.
The islands were recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage List “for the wealth of their ecosystems which reflect a wide range of evolutionary processes”.
