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It has long been recognized that plants and animals profoundly
affect one another's characteristics during the course of
evolution. However, the importance of coevolution as a dynamic
process involving such diverse factors as chemical communication,
population structure and dynamics, energetics, and the evolution,
structure, and functioning of ecosystems has been widely recognized
for a comparatively short time. Coevolution represents a point of
view about the structure of nature that only began to be fully
explored in the late twentieth century. The papers presented here
herald its emergence as an important and promising field of
biological research. Coevolution of Animals and Plants is the first
book to focus on the dynamic aspects of animal-plant coevolution.
It covers, as broadly as possible, all the ways in which plants
interact with animals. Thus, it includes discussions of
leaf-feeding animals and their impact on plant evolution as well as
of predator-prey relationships involving the seeds of angiosperms.
Several papers deal with the most familiar aspect of mutualistic
plant-animal interactions-pollination relationships. The
interactions of orchids and bees, ants and plants, and butterflies
and plants are discussed. One article provides a fascinating
example of more indirect relationships centered around the role of
carotenoids, which are produced by plants but play a fundamental
part in the visual systems of both plants and animals. Coevolution
of Animals and Plants provides a general conceptual framework for
studies on animal-plant interaction. The papers are written from a
theoretical, rather than a speculative, standpoint, stressing
patterns that can be applied in a broader sense to relationships
within ecosystems. Contributors to the volume include Paul Feeny,
Miriam Rothschild, Christopher Smith, Brian Hocking, Lawrence
Gilbert, Calaway Dodson, Herbert Baker, Bernd Heinrich, Doyle
McKey, and Gordon Frankie.
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