Both Diurnal and Nocturnal Frugivores Eat the Fruits of Piper sancti-felicis, (Piperaceae)
Abstract
Piper sancti-felicis is a common, early successional
shrub of wet Neotropical forests. The shrub displays very
low fecundity matched with continual fruiting throughout the
year. Its fruits lack a bright color, have a sweet odor,
and are relatively large. Together these characteristics
have led past workers to consider it a specialized, bat-dispersed
shrub. In order to test this assumption, a population
of 835 fruits on 24 shrubs was closely monitored by means of a
twice-daily census. The disappearances of four times as many
fruits during the daytime as during the nighttime show that
bats can only be responsible for the disappearance of one-fifth
of the fruits. These findings substantiate views that,
given the instability of a successional habitat, obligate
coevolved associations probably rarely develop, but rather
selection moves toward "general" associations. Before
generalized classifications of dispersal systems can be arrived
at, more actual field studies must be done.