Effect of monkeys’ digestive tract and some factors on Opuntia tuna (L.) Mill. seed germination in the special reserve of gueumbeul (Senegal)
International Journal of Development Research
Effect of monkeys’ digestive tract and some factors on Opuntia tuna (L.) Mill. seed germination in the special reserve of gueumbeul (Senegal)
Received 11th October, 2020; Received in revised form 16th November, 2020; Accepted 04th December, 2020; Published online 30th January, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Raimundo Valmir de Oliveira et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Opuntia tuna is a resilient plant, used toprotect against wind and water erosion for the restoration of degraded soils. Its introduction, as a fence hedge, in the Special Reserve of Gueumbeul (Senegal), has led to a proliferation of the species in this area. This proliferation has drastically reduced the areas of predilection of the animals. This is aggravated by the lack of initiative in the processing of fruits and cactus snowshoes. In order to contribute to a better knowledge of the biology and good management of this plant, we proposed to evaluate the effect of transit in the digestive tract of monkeys and different treatments on the germination of cactus seeds. The results obtained showed that seeds transiting through the digestive tract of monkeys (SD), gave the highest germination rate (58.3%) compared to the germination rate (48.6%) of seeds directly extracted from fruits (SF). Soaking SD seeds in water for 24 hours greatly improved the germination rate to 68%. Scarification with sulfuric acid for 5 and 15 min and soaking in boiling water did not improve this rate.The direct seeding tests revealed that the sand substrate gives a better germination rate than the soil substrate for seeds kept at the ambient temperature.
