Fish eat fruit?!?! Who knew?

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised by this but Anderson JT et al. have recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Society B about an Amazonian frugivore called Colossoma macropomum.  Animals will become adapted to eat pretty much anything they can find in their environment so I'm not sure why a fruit eating fish is so amusing and surprising to me.  Apparently a large amount of fruit falls into floodplains in the Amazon during flood season and the authors showed that these fish eat the fruit and retain the seeds in their gut for several days.  The fish travel fairly long distances during this time period allowing seeds to be dispersed 100's of meters and in some cases over 1,000 meters away from where the fruit was originally dropped.  In addition most of the seeds dispersed by a fish were likely to wind up in a suitable habitat.  Of course like most ecological stories this one comes with a warning.  Colussoma macropomum are currently being overfished, potentially threatening the dispersal mechanisms of some Amazonian plants.