a talk by Richard T. CorlettProfessor, Department of Biological Sciences, NUS
If a subject interested Charles Darwin, you can be almost certain that it is worthy of further study. His books and personal correspondence show that he was fascinated by seed dispersal and carried out many experiments, some of which were pretty bizarre (like feeding seeds to fish to see if they could then survive passage through the guts of a heron).
Dispersal biology has fascinated many great biologists since Darwin and the classic synthesis by Henry Ridley – based to a large extent on his experience as Director of the Botanic Gardens in Singapore – is still worth reading, nearly 80 years after it was first published.
As ecology became a Science, however, dispersal biology tended to be dismissed as mere natural history: too idiosyncratic and unpredictable for serious scientific study. Over the last decade or so, two things have brought dispersal biology
back into the centre of ecology.
Firstly, dispersal limitation – the fact that no plant manages to disperse its seeds to all sites where they could potentially grow - has become central to modern theories of species coexistence. Secondly, ecologists have begun to realize that the dispersal services Darwin and Ridley took for granted are now threatened by the extinction of many of the animal species on which they depend. These twin concerns have encouraged the application of a range of new techniques to seed dispersal studies. As a result we can now start putting numbers on some of the things that Darwin speculated about.
And, hey, it’s still cool stuff.
Missed the talk? No fret, there's a wonderful write up of the talk by Marcus Ng on the annotated budak blog: "Missing in action: Megafauna and seed dispersal in Asia's empty forests"
Time: 4pm
Venue: LT 20, Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore
