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).