Rethinking the role of color in avian fruit choices and foraging mechanisms

This repository contains the data and code of the manuscript "Rethinking the role of color in avian fruit choices and foraging mechanisms" by João Vitor S. Messeder, Benjamin Scott Vizzachero, Juan M. Morales, Hong Ma & Tomás A. Carlo. This manuscript was accepted for publication in Functional Ecology on 08/10/25. Our objectives consisted of:1- Analyze community level bird-fruit interactions sampled in five different communities to assess whether birds preferentially interact with fruits of colors predicted by the dispersal syndrome hypothesis.2- Analyze whether birds interact more with artificial fruits mimicking a familiar fruiting plant or of novel colors through field experiments. For details on research questions, hypotheses, sampling design, and analyses please refer to the original manuscript (reference information to be added after manuscript publication). Please see the README.txt file for detailed information about datasets and code.