What If Gone

Species → Blue-and-yellow Macaw

Blue-and-yellow Macaw

Ara ararauna

greater than 10,000 mature individuals per the IUCN, with a global…
Extinction risk Least Concern
Tropical forestSeed disperserSavanna
Blue-and-yellow Macaw (Ara ararauna)
Photo: H. Zell, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact High
In Bolivia

Three macaw species, including the blue-and-yellow macaw, disperse 75 to 100% of the fruit of the motacú palm — the biomass-dominant tree of this landscape — carrying it up to 1,200 meters to perching trees, a dispersal efficiency nearly three times higher than that of cattle, often presented as a substitute for extinct megafauna.

Documented
Detail

Baños-Villalba, A., Blanco, G., Díaz-Luque, J.A., Dénes, F.V., Hiraldo, F. & Tella, J.L. (2017). Seed dispersal by macaws shapes the landscape of an Amazonian ecosystem. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 7373.

The study maps young palm locations relative to macaw perching trees and cattle paths: proximity to perches favors young palms, proximity to cattle paths disfavors them, because cattle trampling and soil compaction make dispersal ineffective even when seeds are ingested.

Over a few decades

Since the macaw is nearly irreplaceable as an effective disperser of the motacú palm, its local disappearance — already underway in Paraguay and elsewhere under pet-trade pressure — should reduce the connectivity between forest islands that the Bolivian study attributes to it, but no one has yet measured this connectivity loss in an area where the macaw has actually disappeared.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir de Baños-Villalba et al. (2017), qui documente le mécanisme de dispersion mais pas un cas réel de disparition locale de l'ara sur un site suivi.

The reasoning builds directly on the mechanism demonstrated by Baños-Villalba et al. (2017): if cattle cannot compensate for the loss of the macaw as a disperser, the bird's local disappearance should logically slow the palm's recolonization of savanna landscapes — a plausible but not yet field-observed effect.

What's missing to confirm it: A comparative monitoring of motacú palm regeneration between an area where the macaw has disappeared and a control area where it persists, over several years.

Documentation

Last verified: August 14, 2026