The Distribution of Feeding Habits Among Animals in a Tropical Rain Forest

Tropical Rain forest is an enormously complicated habitat, of which the animals have been so far but little studied. Our knowledge of these animals, however, is now emerging from the taxonomic stage, and the botanical studies, upon which the zoological are inevitably based, are now sufficiently advanced to support this. In particular the invaluable work of Richards (1952) has done much to draw together scattered knowledge and make it available to the non-botanist. The great difficulty in the study of Rain forest is one of integration. It is literally true to say that one cannot see the wood for the trees. There is no one position in which one can stand and get a good view of a complete sample of forest, and it is correspondingly difficult to visualize the relationships between, say, animals living on the forest floor and those out of sight in the canopy, perhaps a hundred feet above. In such circumstances, ideas and patterns into which one can fit (or fail to fit) one's observations assume a special value. The present paper uses the results of some observations, made over the last decade, on the food of mammals in Malaysian and Australian Rain forests to draw up a simple scheme of the classification of feeding habits within forest of this kind.