FOR201H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Anemophily, Seed Predation, Flightless Bird
Document Summary
Lecture 6: ecological interactions in the rain forest: tropical flowering and fruiting and its importance for conservation. Plants and animals interact in wide variety of ways. Some of main kinds of interactions involve: But also could be good (i. e. squirrels cache nuts) Ex: orchid with 1 specialist pollinator that services it. Are orchid bees where tongue of bee fits exactly into orchid. Other bees with shorter tongues can"t get to nectaries. Darwin: found long flower and predicted that there would be a bee with long tongue and they actually found such a bee. Ex: every fig has one or more fig wasps specialized on that fig. But not the rule tends to be more diffuse interactions. Data on how specialized plant-pollinator relationships were. Found that non-tropical areas (temperate) tend to have greater degree of specialization. For specialist pollinators in tropics, just finding your plant is a problem if there are so many plants.
