There is little evidence that phytotelm habitats such as tree holes or bamboo cups held in different species of plant are different from each other in any way that reflects the species of the host plant. For other classes of phytotelm habitat, however, this is not the case. For bromeliads in the Neotropics there is a wide range of plant form and container morphology which reflects through into the animal food web that occurs within them (Picado 1913, Laessle 1961, Fish & Beaver 1978). The other class of phytotelm where the species of host plant is likely to be important is the pitchers of species of Nepenthes. There has been little study of this topic, which offers interesting opportunities for investigation of the impact of plant structure, chemistry, longevity, and so forth, upon the animal community. We took the opportunity to make such a study using Nepenthes as our subject and, in this short chapter, I present these results.

Food webs from six species of pitcher plant in Borneo

In 1989 Charles Clarke and I examined six co-occurring species of this genus of pitcher plants in Brunei in northern Borneo. As described in earlier chapters, there are more than 70 species of pitcher plants of the genus Nepenthes spread throughout the Old-World tropics. In the island of Borneo alone, Kurata (1976) records 30 species. Many of these species occur over only very restricted ranges in inaccessible and poorly known parts of this vast tropical island.