Speaker
Description
Fleshy fruits have evolved to attract seed-dispersing animals to ingest the seed and disperse it away from the mother tree. Fleshy fruits evolved independently multiple times across all major angiosperm families and dispersal by frugivorous animals is the major dispersal strategy of a majority of woody flowering plants, particularly in tropical religions. These fruits interact with a diverse set of frugivores: from the smallest songbirds to elephants; from ground-dwelling foxes through tree-climbing primates to flying bats; and from visually-acute birds and lizards to color-blind lemurs that prefer to use their noses. This functional diversity in animals drives their foraging and food selection behavior, and in turn exerts selection pressures on functional fruit traits, driving trait-matching between animals and plants. The talk will provide the background to these processes and introduce the work conducted at the Evolutionary Ecology workgroup. It will cover projects using metabolomics to understand the evolution of fruit chemical diversity; microbiology to uncover the role of the fruit microbiome in animal-plant interactions; behavioral ecology to understand how fruit traits drive animal-behavior; chemistry to identify drivers of variation in fruit nutrient profiles; physiology to explore the ecology and evolution of fruit maturation processes; and macroevolution to reconstruct the processes driving the initial evolution of fleshy fruits in deep time.
| Status Group | Senior Scientist |
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