Fleming T.H., Kress W.J. The Ornaments of Life: Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. — 615 p.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 have included a series of breathtaking color plates and full-color graphs and diagrams.The Scope of This Book
Patterns of Regional and Community Diversity
The Resource Base
Pollen and Seed Dispersal and Their Ecological and Genetic Consequences
Macroevolutionary Consequences of Pollen and Seed Dispersal
Phylogeny and Biogeography of These Mutualisms
The Pollination Mutualism
The Frugivory Mutualism
Synthesis and Conclusions about the Ecology and Evolution of Vertebrate-Angiosperm Mutualisms
The Future of Vertebrate-Angiosperm Mutualisms
Appendix 1: Overview of the Major Families of Plants containing Species That Are Pollinated or Dispersed by Birds or Mammals
Appendix 2: Overview of the Major Families of Plants containing Species That Are Pollinated or Dispersed by Birds or MammalsSpecies Index
Subject Index