The Ornaments Of Life

About this book

The average kilometer of tropical rainforest is teeming with life; it contains thousands of species of plants and animals. As The Ornaments of Life reveals, many of the most colorful and eye-catching rainforest inhabitants – toucans, monkeys, leaf-nosed bats, and hummingbirds, to name a few – are an important component of the infrastructure that supports life in the forest. These fruit-and-nectar eating birds and mammals pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds of hundreds of tropical plants, and unlike temperate communities, much of this greenery relies exclusively on animals for reproduction.

Synthesizing recent research by ecologists and evolutionary biologists, Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress demonstrate the tremendous functional and evolutionary importance of these tropical pollinators and frugivores. They shed light on how these mutually symbiotic relationships evolved and lay out the current conservation status of these essential species. In order to illustrate the striking beauty of these “ornaments” of the rainforest, the authors of The Ornaments of Life have included a series of breathtaking color plates and full-color graphs and diagrams.

Contents

Preface

1     The Scope of This Book
2     Patterns of Regional and Community Diversity
3     The Resource Base
4     Patterns of Pollen and Seed Dispersal and Their Ecological and Genetic Consequences
5     Macroevolutionary Consequences of Pollen and Seed Dispersal
6     Phylogeny and Biogeography of These Mutualisms
7     The Pollination Mutualism
8     The Frugivory Mutualism
9     Synthesis and Conclusions about the Ecology and Evolution of Angiosperm-Vertebrate Mutualisms
10    The Future of Vertebrate-Angiosperm Mutualisms

Appendix 1: Overview of the Major Families of Avian and Mammalian Pollinators and Seed Dispersers
Appendix 2: Overview of the Major Families of Plants containing Species That Are Pollinated or
Dispersed by Birds or Mammals
References
Index

Biography

Theodore H. Fleming is professor emeritus of biology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. W. John Kress is a curator and research botanist as well as director of the Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet at the Smithsonian Institution.