Data: fruit size of Indomalayan plants

We assessed evolutionary and biogeographic transitions in woody plant species across the Indo-Malay Archipelago, a series of island groups where the same plant lineages interact with different seed disperser and seed predator assemblages. Fruit size in 2650 taxa spanning the angiosperm tree-of-life tended to be smaller in the Sulawesi and Maluku island groups, where frugivores are less diverse and smaller-bodied, than in the regional source pool.

While numerous plant lineages (not just small-fruited ones) reached the isolated islands, colonists tended to be the smaller-fruited members of each clade. Nearly all evolutionary transitions to smaller fruit size predated, often substantially, organismal dispersal to the islands. Our results suggest that filtering rather than within-island evolution largely determined the distribution of fruit sizes in these regions.