Abstract
Many plants suffer very heavy pre- and/or post-dispersal seed predation by animals. A few exemplary studies (2, 18, 38, 52, 74, 87, 106, 110, 111, 124, 140, 161, 162, 171, 181, 187, 196, 197, 203, 205, 207, 217, 220, 227) and a variety of shorter reports scattered through the agricultural, botanical, and zoological literature suggest a large and important, yet unexploited, field of study. It is clear that the pattern of seed predation is highly structured and that is coevolved at the chemical, spatial, and temporal level. It involves all levels of animal-plant interaction from the internal energy budget of indiciduals to the entire community (203). Owing to parental and sibling competition, successful development of a seedling may depend on the seed's dispersal (101). Equally important, the seed must escape from the predators at the seed crop and in the parent plant's habitat before and after dispersal (111). The game is played by mobile predators in seach of sessile prey; escape is through a single dispersal move, seed chemistry, parental morphology and behavior, and evolutionary change. The processes and patterns are ideal candidates for ecological and evolutionary analyses (83, 111) of the type traditionally conducted by zoologically oriented biologists (37, 51, 73, 141, 155, 156, 182) or applied to plants in general (40, 116, 208, 209, 241).
