Phytochemistry of Tropical Zoochorous Fruit: Mediating Plant–Frugivore Interactions Within Biodiverse Communities

Among plants with animal-dispersed fruits, the phytochemical traits of fruit play a number of key ecological roles, including attracting mutualistic seed dispersers. Beginning on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), expanding across the tropics, and finally returning to BCI, we trace and review the research that has elucidated the ecological and evolutionary relationships of fruit phytochemical traits to avian and mammalian seed dispersers in tropical communities. We first examine the phytochemicals that constitute scent and their roles as foraging signals for mammalian seed dispersers. We then examine pigments and their significance as signals of ripeness and nutrient content to a variety of disperser taxa. Finally, we outline our recent and ongoing work on BCI, which investigates further the phylogenetic structure of fruit phytochemical traits with respect to seed dispersers, drawing on the wealth of ecological data available for BCI, and integrates fruit into an organismal perspective for plant-animal chemical ecology.