Most phyllostomids
are tiny echolocating bats that can navigate
cluttered rainforest understoreys and hover to take
small fruits or to sip nectar from relatively delicate
flowers. Most pteropodids, by contrast, are larger strongflying
bats that locate food by vision and smell, and
typically perch while feeding on larger fruits and morerobust
flowers. Fruit-eating Old World monkeys (Africa
and Asia) are relatively large primates with trichromatic
color vision [10] and well-developed cheek pouches that
enable them to spit, rather than swallow, seeds [11]. Fruiteating
New World monkeys (Neotropics) are smaller
primates, with most individuals being dichromatic. They
lack cheek pouches and typically swallow and defecate
even large seeds. The monkey and fruit bat examples also
illustrate a more general pattern: both fruits and fruiteating
animals are consistently larger in Africa and Asia
than they are in the Neotropics [12].