Step 3: Eastern Prickly Pear (Opuntia austrina)/Saw
Palmetto Ratio
As in all the previous ratios, saw palmetto explained a large amount of
variation when paired with other fleshy fruited species. As a result,
this next ratio, eastern prickly pear/saw palmetto accounted for an
additional 4.61% of the total logratio variance and led the top 10
logratios as the most variance-explaining. Prickly pear made biological
sense as it is a well-known food resource for the gopher tortoise
(Ashton and Ashton 2008, Figueroa et al. 2021), with research indicating
that the gopher tortoise also enhances the germination of its seeds
(Richardson and Stiling 2019a).