The Relationship Between Fruit Crop Sizes and Fruit Removal Rates by Birds

Abstract

It has been proposed that large fruit crops attract disproportionately more frugivores than smaller fruit crops (Snow 1971, Howe and Estabrook 1977). If this is so, then competition between plants for frugivores could be an important source of selection on fruit crop sizes. Field tests of this hypothesis on tropical trees have produced equivocal results (Howe and Smallwood 1982). In six species of fall-fruiting temperate plants, we asked whether the percentage of the fruit that was removed was related to the size of the fruit