Our knowledge of the ecology of tropical rain-forest trees is limited, with detailed information available for perhaps only a few hundred of the many thousand of species that occur. Yet a good understanding of the trees is essential to unravelling the workings of the forest itself. This book aims to summarise contemporary understanding of the ecology of tropical rain-forest trees. The emphasis is on comparative ecology, an approach that can help to identify possible adaptive trends and evolutionary constraints and which may also lead to a workable ecological classification for tree species, conceptually simplifying the rain-forest community and making it more amenable to analysis.

Epiphytes (plants which grow on other plants, not parasitically but for support), comprise more than one-third of the total vascular flora in some tropical forests. Growing within tropical forest canopies, epiphytes are subject to severe environmental constraints, and their diverse adaptations make them a rich resource for studies of water balance, nutrition, reproduction and evolution. This book synthesizes the body of information from research on epiphytes and their relations with other tropical biota, and provides a comprehensive overview of basic functions, life history, evolution, and the place of epiphytes in complex tropical communities. Tropical ecologists and zoologists as well as plant scientists will find this volume a useful guide to research on the twenty-five thousand species of epiphytes which root in the crowns of tropical trees.

Humans have been fascinated by bees for centuries. Bees display a wide spectrum of behaviours and ecological roles that have provided biologists with a vast amount of material for study. Among the types observed are both social and solitary bees, those that either pollinate or destroy flowers, and those that display traits allowing them to survive underwater. Others fly mainly at night, and some build their nests either in the ground or in the tallest rain forest trees. This highly acclaimed book summarises and interprets research from around the world on tropical bee diversity and draws together major themes in ecology, natural history and evolution. The numerous photographs and line illustrations, and the large reference section, qualify this book as a field guide and reference for workers in tropical and temperate research. The fascinating ecology and natural history of these bees will also provide absorbing reading for other ecologists and naturalists. This book was first published in 1989.

Tropical fish present some of the best examples of how new species evolve and how complex ecological communities are maintained. Their study has generated important new ideas on the roles of ecology and behaviour in the evolution of species and communities. This book brings together for the first time the results of widely scattered research on fish in tropical rivers, lakes and seas, research that has been stimulated by the splendid opportunities to observe the behaviour of fish in their natural habitats in the clear warm waters. The book opens with an overview of the ecology of tropical freshwater and marine environments and their associated fish faunas, and then presents a number of freshwater studies drawn from the African, South American, Asian and New Guinea tropics. Special consideration is given to the new man-made lakes which have provided large-scale experiments on the change of riverine fish communities to lacustrine ones, and to the great lakes of East Africa for examples of recent species evolution.