Keywords
CYPRESS CROWN COLONIES
How to Cite
Abstract
Obligate epiphytes are vagrants via-reproductive units and move among host islands scattered across hostile seas of treeless space and unaccommodating canopy vegetation. Within acceptable crowns, these plants face a finer-grained patchiness enforced by gaps between adjacent branches and by shade and rain shadows. Surfaces colonized by canopy dwellers are unstable. Quite often the lives of branches or even whole trees are too short to allow a resident epiphyte time to mature or, should adulthood be achieved, to fruit more than a few seasons. Exacerbating the disturbance factor are aridity and site infertility. Both increase a population's vulnerability to environmental perturbations by prolonging juvenility (the interval an organism needs to amass resources for a first reproductive effort) and the "recharge" time subsequently required between successive fruiting seasons. Canopies of most tropical forests experience dry seasons of varying lengths and parallel
degrees of oligotrophy (Benzing & Renfrow, 1980). In essence, organisms obligated to anchor on bark surfaces face a particularly formidable combination of density-independent constraints, perhaps a more imposing set than those impacting on most soil-rooting taxa (Benzing, 1978a).
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