Plant–animal interaction

[1][2] Plant-animal interactions can take on important ecological functions and manifest in a variety of combinations of favorable and unfavorable associations, for example predation, frugivory and herbivory, parasitism, and mutualism.

[3] Without mutualistic relationships, some plants may not be able to complete their life cycles, and the animals may starve due to resource deficiency.

[4] The earliest vascular plants initially formed on the planet about 425 million years ago, in the Devonian period of the early Paleozoic era.

[6] Since 300 million years ago, insects have been known to consume nectar and pollinate flowers.

In the Mesozoic, between 200 and 150 million years ago, insects' feeding patterns started to diversify.

[8] Over the history of their shared evolution, plants and animals have significantly diverged, in large part because of productive co-evolutionary processes that emerged from antagonistic interactions.

The seeds are subsequently dispersed in a new spot some distance from the parent plant, frequently with feces that also serves as a little amount of fertilizer.