Overview
- Editors:
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Alejandro Estrada
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Theodore H. Fleming
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Table of contents (32 chapters)
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Front Matter
Pages I-XIII
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Plant strategies
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- Alejandro Estrada, Theodore H. Fleming
Pages 3-4
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- Julie Sloan Denslow, Timothy C. Moermond, Douglas J. Levey
Pages 37-44
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- Edmund W. Stiles, Douglas W. White
Pages 45-54
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- Mary F. Willson, William G. Hoppes
Pages 55-69
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- C. VaÁZquez-Yanes, A. Orozco-Segovia
Pages 71-77
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Frugivore strategies
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- Alejandro Estrada, Theodore H. Fleming
Pages 81-83
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- Charles H. Janson, Edmund W. Stiles, Douglas W. White
Pages 83-92
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- Alejandro Estrada, Rosamond Coates-Estrada
Pages 93-104
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- Timothy C. Moermond, Julie S. Denslow, Douglas J. Levey, Eduardo C. Santana
Pages 137-146
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- David W. Snow, Barbara K. Snow
Pages 159-164
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The consequences of seed dispersal
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Front Matter
Pages 165-165
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- Alejandro Estrada, Theodore H. Fleming
Pages 167-168
About this book
A wide variety of plants, ranging in size from forest floor herbs to giant canopy trees, rely on animals to disperse their seeds. Typical values of the proportion of tropical vascular plants that produce fleshy fruits and have animal-dispersed seeds range from 50-90%, depending on habitat. In this section, the authors discuss this mutualism from the plant's perspective. Herrera begins by challenging the notion that plant traits traditionally interpreted as being the product of fruit-frugivore coevolution really are the outcome of a response-counter-response kind of evolutionary process. He uses examples of congeneric plants living in very different biotic and abiotic environments and whose fossilizable characteristics have not changed over long periods of time to argue that there exists little or no basis for assuming that gradualistic change and environmental tracking characterizes the interactions between plants and their vertebrate seed dispersers. A common theme that runs through the papers by Herrera, Denslow et at. , and Stiles and White is the importance of the 'fruiting environment' (i. e. the spatial relationships of conspecific and non-conspecific fruiting plants) on rates of fruit removal and patterns of seed rain. Herrera and Denslow et at. point out that this environment is largely outside the control of individual plant species and, as a result, closely coevolved interactions between vertebrates and plants are unlikely to evolve.
Reviews
`This book is a must for every seed dispersal ecologist, and is, therefore, higly recommended.'
S. Godschalk, South American Journal on Zoology, 1989.
`... this book is a valuable source of information and methodological approaches for all students who are and will be attracted by this field of modern ecology.'
L. Klimes, Folia Geobotanica et Phytotaxonomica, Vol. 24, 1989.