Cloth $125.00 ISBN: 9780226253404 Published October 2013
Paper $50.00 ISBN: 9780226253411 Published October 2013
E-book $7.00 to $40.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226023328 Published October 2013

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The Ornaments of Life

Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics

Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress

The Ornaments of Life
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Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress

616 pages | 98 color plates, 2 halftones, 15 line drawings, 53 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2013
Interspecific Interactions
Cloth $125.00 ISBN: 9780226253404 Published October 2013
Paper $50.00 ISBN: 9780226253411 Published October 2013
E-book $7.00 to $40.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226023328 Published October 2013
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.  
Susanne Renner | Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität
“Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress here bring together current knowledge of the ecology and evolution of vertebrate-plant mutualisms, from biogeography and energetics through species proliferation and conservation. They’ve analyzed the reciprocal ‘fine-tuning’ between bird-pollinated flowers and nectarivorous birds, or fruits and seed dispersers, on a worldwide scale and in the context of molecular-clock dated phylogenies, resulting in an unrivaled synthesis.” 
Douglas Levey | National Science Foundation
“Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress provide an around-the-world tour of tropical flowers and fruits, and mutual dependency between the plants that produce them and the animals that visit them.  The rich blend of natural history and evolutionary ecology yields many new insights about origins and importance of these ‘ornaments’ to tropical ecosystems.  This book will spark the imagination and curiosity of anyone interested in the beauty of nature.” 
The Plant Press: A quarterly newsletter from the Dept. of Botany and the U.S. National Herbarium
"The most extensive synthesis of tropical plant-animal interactions ever published."
Contents
 

Preface

1     The Scope of This Book
2     Patterns of Regional and Community Diversity
3     The Resource Base
4     Patterns of Pollen and Seed Dispersal and Their Ecological and Genetic Consequences
5     Macroevolutionary Consequences of Pollen and Seed Dispersal
6     Phylogeny and Biogeography of These Mutualisms
7     The Pollination Mutualism
8     The Frugivory Mutualism
9     Synthesis and Conclusions about the Ecology and Evolution of Angiosperm-Vertebrate Mutualisms
10    The Future of Vertebrate-Angiosperm Mutualisms

Appendix 1: Overview of the Major Families of Avian and Mammalian Pollinators and Seed Dispersers
Appendix 2: Overview of the Major Families of Plants containing Species That Are Pollinated or
Dispersed by Birds or Mammals
References
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Biological Sciences: Botany | Conservation | Ecology | Evolutionary Biology | Natural History

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