The Strength and Drivers of Bird-Mediated Selection on Fruit Crop Size: A Meta-Analysis

Facundo X Palacio,Mariano Ordano

doi:10.3389/fevo.2018.00018

Abstract

Fil: Palacio, Facundo Xavier. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Division Zoologia de Vertebrados. Seccion Ornitologia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico - Tucuman. Unidad Ejecutora Lillo; Argentina

Highlights

A major challenge in evolutionary ecology is to understand how mutualistic interactions between plants and animals drive the evolution of plant phenotype (Strauss and Irwin, 2004)
Significant positive effects (z-transformed values) of bird-mediated selection on fruit crop size were detected for bird visitation rate and the number of fruit removed, but not for the proportion of fruit removed
As Snow (1971) proposed in the first study on the evolutionary ecology of seed dispersal by birds, our meta-analysis suggests that fruit crop size represents a prominent target of birdmediated selection, and that birds promote larger fruit crop sizes as an overall pattern in nature

Summary

Introduction

A major challenge in evolutionary ecology is to understand how mutualistic interactions between plants and animals drive the evolution of plant phenotype (Strauss and Irwin, 2004). Under this scenario of signal-reward correlation (Benitez-Vieyra et al, 2010), the expected outcome is directional selection on the number of fruit (Snow, 1971; Carr, 1992; Ortiz-Pulido and RicoGray, 2000), as well as other fruit and seed traits (e.g., size, color, water and nutrient content, coat thickness; Jordano, 2000; Herrera, 2002) This selection regime may be modified by Selection Strength on Fruit Crop Size different factors, such as the costs of fruit production or selection pressures imposed by antagonistic interactors (Jordano, 1987; Parciak, 2002; Russo, 2003; Burns, 2015; Muñoz et al, 2017). The underlying mechanism of the evolution of repeated plant structures (leaves, flowers, and fruits) is still poorly understood (Herrera, 2009, 2017)

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