Fruit-eating birds and bird-dispersed plants in the tropics and temperate zone.

Tropical forests have been the showcase for studies on the mutualistic relationship between plants and their avian seed dispersers. Only in the tropics can one find such a bewildering diversity of fruit types, or birds that survive on nothing but fruits. But to what degree is the typical tropical plant-bird interaction qualitatively different from interactions in the temperate zone? The emerging view from a decade of research is that plant-bird interactions everywhere are ecologically important, complex, facultative, diffuse, asymmetric and fundamentally similar.