Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T05:58:01.025Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effects of forest age on fruit composition and removal in tropical bird-dispersed understorey trees

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Heather A. Lumpkin  and
W. Alice Boyle
Heather A. Lumpkin*
Affiliation:
Department of Life Sciences, Bethel College, 1001 W. McKinley Ave. Mishawaka, IN 46545, USA
W. Alice Boyle
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario, Department of Biology, London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada
*
1Corresponding author. Current address: Department of Zoology, Birge Hall, University of Wisconsin, 430 Lincoln Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Little is known about how land-use changes affect interspecific interactions such as fruit–frugivore mutualisms. Forest age could affect both fruit sugar concentrations via differences in light availability or disperser abundance, and fruit removal rates via differences in bird and plant community composition. We examined how these two factors are affected by forest age in a Costa Rican rain forest. We compared seven young-secondary forest species, seven old-growth forest species, and Miconia nervosa growing in both forests. We measured sugar concentrations in fruits and manipulated the location of paired fruiting branches, measuring subsequent fruit removal. Sugar concentration means were on average 2.1 percentage points higher in young-secondary forest species than in old-growth forest species, but did not differ among Miconia nervosa fruits from the two forests. Fruit removal rates were higher in young-secondary forest for 86% of young-secondary forest species, 71% of old-growth forest species, and on average for both young-secondary and old-growth forest Miconia nervosa individuals. Higher sugar concentrations in young-secondary forest plants could reflect stronger competition for dispersers, while experimental fruit removal results suggests the opposite patterns of competition; fruits are more likely to be removed by dispersers in young-secondary forest independent of fruit nutrient concentration.

Keywords

birdsCosta Ricafrugivoryfruit removalfruit sugar concentrationLa Selva Biological Stationold-growth forestsecondary forest
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 25 , Issue 5 , September 2009 , pp. 515 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

LITERATURE CITED

ALTSHULER, D. L. 2001. Ultraviolet reflectance in fruits, ambient light composition and fruit removal in a tropical forest. Evolutionary Ecology Research 3:767–778.Google Scholar
BLAKE, J. G. & HOPPES, W. G. 1986. Influence of resource abundance on use of tree-fall gaps by birds in an isolated woodlot. Auk 103:328–340.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BLAKE, J. G. & LOISELLE, B. A. 1991. Variation in resource abundance affects capture rates of birds in three lowland habitats in Costa Rica. Auk 108:114–130.Google Scholar
BLAKE, J. G. & LOISELLE, B. A. 1992. Fruits in the diets of neotropical migrant birds in Costa Rica. Biotropica 24:200–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BLAKE, J. G. & LOISELLE, B. A. 2001. Bird assemblages in second-growth and old-growth forests, Costa Rica: perspectives from mist nets and point counts. Auk 118:304–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BLAKE, J. G., STILES, F. G. & LOISELLE, B. A. 1990. Birds of La Selva Biological Station: habitat use, trophic composition, and migrants. Pp. 161–182 in Gentry, A. (ed.). Four Neotropical rainforests. Yale University Press, New Haven.Google Scholar
BOYLE, W. A. 2006. Why do birds migrate? The role of food, habitat, predation, and competition. PhD thesis, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.Google Scholar
BUTTERFIELD, R. P. 1994. The regional context: land colonization and conservation in Sarapiquí. Pp. 299–306 in McDade, L. A., Bawa, K. S., Hespenheide, H. A. & Hartshorn, G. S. (eds.). La Selva: ecology and natural history of a Neotropical rain forest. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
CARLO, T. A. 2005. Interspecific neighbors change seed dispersal pattern of an avian-dispersed plant. Ecology 86:2440–2449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CHAZDON, R. L. 2003. Tropical forest recovery: legacies of human impact and natural disturbances. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 6:51–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CHAZDON, R. L. & FETCHER, N. 1984. Photosynthetic light environments in a lowland tropical rain forest in Costa Rica. Journal of Ecology 72:553–564.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CHAZDON, R. L., CAREAGA, S., WEBB, C. & VARGAS, O. 2003. Community and phylogenetic structure of reproductive traits of woody species in wet tropical forests. Ecological Monographs 73:331–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ELZINGA, J. A., ATLAN, A., BIERE, A., GIGORD, L., WEIS, A. E. & BERNASCONI, G. 2007. Time after time: flowering phenology and biotic interaction. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22:432–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FERNANDES, D. N. & SANFORD, R. L. 1995. Effects of recent land-use practices on soil nutrients and succession under tropical wet forest in Costa Rica. Conservation Biology 9:915–922.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HARTSHORN, G. S. 1983. Plants: introduction. Pp. 118–157 in Janzen, D. H. (ed.). Costa Rican natural history. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
HOULE, G. 1995. Seed dispersal and seedling recruitment: the missing link(s). Ecoscience 2:238–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HOWE, H. F. & MIRITI, M. N. 2000. No question: seed dispersal matters. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 15:34–436.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
ITTO. 2002. International Tropical Timber Organization guidelines for the restoration, management and rehabilitation of degraded and secondary tropical forests. ITTO Policy Development Series No. 13.Google Scholar
JORDANO, P. 1995. Fleshy fruits and seed dispersers: a comparative analysis of adaptation and constraints in plant–animal interactions. American Naturalist 145:163–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LEVEY, D. J. 1987a. Seed size and fruit-handling techniques of avian frugivores. American Naturalist 129:471–485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LEVEY, D. J. 1987b. Sugar-tasting ability and fruit selection in tropical fruit-eating birds. Auk 104:173–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LEVEY, D. J. 1988a. Spatial and temporal variation in Costa Rican fruit and fruit-eating bird abundance. Ecological Monographs 58:251–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LEVEY, D. J. 1988b. Tropical wet forest treefall gaps and distributions of understory birds and plants. Ecology 69:1076–1089.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LOISELLE, B. A. & BLAKE, J. G. 1990. Diets of understory fruit-eating birds in Costa Rica: seasonality and resource abundance. Studies in Avian Biology 13:91–103.Google Scholar
LOISELLE, B. A. & BLAKE, J. G. 1999. Dispersal of melastome seeds by fruit-eating birds of tropical forest understory. Ecology 80:330–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MARTÍNEZ-GARZA, C. & HOWE, H. F. 2003. Restoring tropical diversity: beating the time tax on species loss. Journal of Applied Ecology 40:423–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MONTGOMERY, R. A. & CHAZDON, R. L. 2001. Forest structure, canopy architecture, and light transmittance in tropical wet forests. Ecology 82:2707–2718.Google Scholar
ÖDEEN, A. & HÅSTAD, O. 2003. Complex distribution of avian color vision systems revealed by sequencing the SWS1 opsin from total DNA. Molecular Biology and Evolution 20:855–861.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
POULIN, B., WRIGHT, S. J., LEFEBVRE, G. & CALDERON, O. 1999. Interspecific synchrony and asynchrony in the fruiting phenologies of congeneric bird-dispersed plants in Panama. Journal of Tropical Ecology 15:213–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
PRINGLE, C., CHACON, I., GRAYUM, M., GREENE, H., HARTSHORN, G., SCHATZ, G., STILES, G., GOMEZ, C. & RODRIGUEZ, M. 1984. Natural history observations and ecological evaluation of the La Selva Protection Zone, Costa Rica. Brenesia 22:189–206.Google Scholar
RESTREPO, C., GOMEZ, N. & HEREDIA, S. 1999. Anthropogenic edges, treefall gaps, and fruit–frugivore interactions in a neotropical montane forest. Ecology 80:668–685.Google Scholar
SANFORD, K & CLAYTON, N. S. 2008. Motivation and memory in zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) foraging behaviour. Animal Cognition 11:189–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SCHAEFER, H. M., SCHAEFER, V. & LEVEY, D. J. 2004. How plant–animal interactions signal new insights in communication. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 19:577–584.Google Scholar
STILES, F. G. & ROSSELLI, L. 1993. Consumption of fruits of the Melastomataceae by birds: how diffuse is the coevolution? Vegetatio 108:57–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WATSON, R, WRIGHT, C. J., MCBURNEY, T., TAYLOR, A. J. & LINFORTH, R. S. T. 2002. Influence of harvest date and light integral on the development of strawberry flavour compounds. Journal of Experimental Botany 53:2121–2129.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
WHEELWRIGHT, N. T. & ORIANS, G. H. 1982. Seed dispersal by animals: contrasts with pollen dispersal, problems with terminology, constraints on coevolution. American Naturalist 119:402–413.Google Scholar
WUNDERLE, J. M., WILLIG, M. R. & PINTO-HENRIQUES, L. M. 2005. Avian distribution in treefall gaps and understory of terra firme forest in the lowland Amazon. Ibis 147:109–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar