THE SIZES OF VERTEBRATE-DISPERSED FRUITS - A NEOTROPICAL-PALEOTROPICAL COMPARISON

Seed and fruit size are important to rain forest trees because they limit what can disperse their seeds and they influence what type of defenses and nutrient reserves their seedlings will acquire. Where establishment conditions might favor larger seeds, maximum seed size can be constrained by disperser size. Because the Paleotropics have larger frugivores than the Neotropics, I predicted more large fruits would be found in the Paleotropics. In eight pantropical, endozoochorous plant families, the Old World representatives tended to have more taxa with larger fruits than the New World representatives. In all families the mean and range of fruit sizes were greater in the Old World, which suggests that the evolution of large fruits and seeds might be more tightly constrained in the Neotropics owing to the relative scarcity of large frugivores there.