The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Seed Chemistry as Relates to Seed Predation

Abstract

My goal is to understand the ecological significance of seed chemistry to the seed and to its potential consumers and to identify some of the selection pressures by seed predators that may lead to and maintain chemical traits of seeds. This will be a blurred inquiry for two reasons. First, our knowledge of seed chemistry is unusually incomplete; seeds generally have not been studied as organisms but as sources of drugs, chemotaxonomic traits, or food for man and domestic animals. It is the nature of such inquiries to study one aspect of many species of seeds, rather than study many aspects of one species of seed. Second, those who have studied seeds as organisms have treated them largely as inert pills to be dispersed or as black boxes which generate seedlings.