title: Fruit-eating birds and bird-dispersed plants in the tropics and temperate zone.
abstract: Tropical forests have been the showcase for studies on the mutualistic relationship between plants and their avian seed dispersers. Only in the tropics can one find such a bewildering diversity of fruit types, or birds that survive on nothing but fruits. But to what degree is the typical tropical plant-bird interaction qualitatively different from interactions in the temperate zone? The emerging view from a decade of research is that plant-bird interactions everywhere are ecologically important, complex, facultative, diffuse, asymmetric and fundamentally similar.
authors.affiliation: Dept of Biology, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME 04011, USA.
authors.forename: N T
authors.initials: NT
authors.lastname: Wheelwright