Consumption of macro-fungi by invertebrates in a Mexican tropical cloud forest: do fruit body characteristics matter?

The emphasis of antagonistic fungus-consumer interactions to date has been on temperate taxa and predominantly zoocentric, neglecting the effects on t he fungal component. These interactions are expected to be especially compl ex and diverse in the tropics, where both components display their greatest diversity. Variability in fungivory (apparent biomass consumed) of underst orey basidiomycetes in a tropical cloud forest was investigated to test whe ther this could be explained (at the proximate level) by apparency-related characteristics of the aboveground structures (colour of pileus, stipe and hymenium; size and aggregation), as has been suggested for plant-herbivore relationships. Considerable interspecific variation in fungivory was detect ed (range 0-50%). Cluster analysis showed that neighbouring clusters had di ssimilar levels of fungivory. Such clusters were similar in colour attribut es of aboveground structures, but differed in aggregation size and apparent biomass. A quantitative analysis also showed that colour attributes were n ot strongly associated with the observed variation of consumption levels, w hereas apparent biomass and aggregation size did correlate with the observe d variation in fungivory. Furthermore, specific identity correlated with fu ngivory. It was concluded that coloration patterns may not be important for fungivory, whereas genet size and species identity (probably via character istics unrelated to apparency, such as mycotoxins and nutritional value) se emed to be critical factors.