Foraging decisions are a central driver of animal movement, shaping how individuals navigate heterogeneous landscapes to meet energetic demands. Movement emerges from the interaction between the external resource environment and an animal's capacity to perceive, evaluate, and track resources across space and time. These multi‐scaled foraging and movement decisions can reduce frugivore travel costs or increase resource profitability, while also having consequences for seed dispersal patterns. Here, we studied the foraging and movement decisions of a tropical frugivore, white‐handed gibbon Hylobates lar , tested how these decisions affected simulated seed dispersal distances, and compared dispersal distances to those generated by foragers making random decisions. We used patch‐to‐patch and patch‐to‐sleep site models to test if gibbons accounted for distance and productivity while selecting resources or sleep sites. We then simulated gibbon movement between resource patches or sleep sites, and modeled seed dispersal along their movement tracks. Gibbons discounted distant and previously exploited resources and generated longer seed dispersal distances than random foragers. By explicitly estimating the strength and direction of these foraging decisions, our study demonstrates that the foraging decisions, movement, and dispersal services of seed dispersers are interlinked, highlighting the functional importance of animal movement for both animal and plant fitness and ecosystem processes.
Borah et al. (Sun,) studied this question.