The Prunus mahaleb natural history page

The Saint Lucy's or Mahoma's cherry (Prunus mahaleb, Rosaceae) is one of my favourite study species. This page keeps a number of notes derived from different sources, dealing with its natural history. It's a summary of our long-term research with this species.

Please, e-mail me ( ) if you are interested in getting additional details. Or write to the postal address:

General description

This dataset accompanies our recent work on megafauna-dispersed fruit species, now in review. We'll update the dataset information as soon as the ms is formally accepted. My previous work on this topic has concentrated on analyses for the whole Angiosperm clade. Recently I'm collaborating with Mauro Galetti and Marco A. Pizo, involving comparative analyses restricted to the tropical families Arecaceae and Myrtaceae, as well as the fruit communities of Mata Atlantica forests and Pantanal. Together with Paulo R. Guimarães Jr., Mauro and I are also analyzing the comparative ecology of the so-called anachronic seed dispersal systems, i.e., plant species with overbuilt fruits supposedly dispersed by an extinct megafauna and not having present-day interactions with frugivorous animals. These fruit species have seriously altered seed dispersal systems.

THE Megafaunal Fruits PACKAGE ACCOMPANIES:

Guimarães Jr., P., Galetti, M. and Jordano, P. 2004. Seed dispersal anachronisms: rethinking the fruits extinct megafauna ate. In 2nd review, December 2004.

It contains a copy of the main data file exactly as used for this paper, as well as other accompanying files (see below).

Taxonomic arrangement follows:
Cronquist, A. (1981). An integrated system of classification of flowering plants. Columbia University Press.

Plant names and names of higher taxonomic categories have been checked with:
Mabberley, D.J. 1987. The plant-book. A portable dictionary of the higher plants. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Please, contact me if you have suggestions, find errors, inconsistencies, or any other bug in the file. As well, please let me know about your uses of this data and send manuscripts and reprints when available. I´ll be happy to help you in any case, as far as I can.

Pollination

Please, contact me if you have suggestions, find errors, inconsistencies, or any other bug in the file. As well, please let me know about your uses of this data and send manuscripts and reprints when available. I´ll be happy to help you in any case, as far as I can.

Seed dispersal.

This is the species list for the dataset, as December 2004.

Contact me at:

Pedro Jordano
Integrative Ecology Group
Estación Biologica de Donana, CSIC
Pabellón del Peru, Avda. M. Luisa, S/N
41013 Sevilla, Spain

Phone: +34 95 4232340 ext 213 (voice)
+34 95 4621125 (fax)
+34 95 4270463 (home, voice)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Camila Donatti, Marco A. Pizo, Jordi Bascompte, Daniel Janzen, John Alroy, Peter Mann de Toledo, Ove Eriksson, and students of the 1^st Latin American course on Frugivory and Seed Dispersal (2002) for discussions and comments about megafaunal fruits and suggestions that helped us in many ways. We thank Connie Barlow and Carlos Yamashita for their help at various stages of this project. The study was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (BOS2000-1366-C02-01) to PJ, CNPq (Bolsa de Produtividade), FAPESP, FUNDUNESP and IFS to MG and FAPESP to PRG (01/1737-3); our collaboration was also funded by CYTED and a CNPq-CSIC agreement.

To download these files, click and hold on the filename and choose 'Save link to disk...'.

Uncompressed

Compressed

Macintosh version

DOS-Wintel version