Table 2.

Mean trait values (with s.d.) for species sampled from Madagascar and three study areas in South Africa. (The percentage of species in each sample that were spiny or with zigzag main axes is also given. Values range from 0 to 1 with large values indicating, respectively, high tensile strength, high lateral displacement, wide-angled branches, thin twigs, branches angled in all dimensions and leaves concentrated in the interior of a plant (electronic supplementary material, methods).)

trait	Madagascar		East Cape thicket		Cedarberg shrubland		Zululand savannah and thicket
	mean	s.d.	mean	s.d.	mean	s.d.	mean	s.d.
N spp.	48		42		19		48
tensile strength	0.90	0.27	0.22	0.36	0.08	0.25	0.24	0.38
lateral displacement	0.98	0.10	0.15	0.28	0.51	0.36	0.20	0.35
wide-angle branches	0.85	0.23	0.36	0.40	0.38	0.43	0.38	0.36
thin twigs	0.73	0.24	0.30	0.34	0.86	0.18	0.31	0.31
three-dimensional branch angles	0.70	0.35	0.89	0.23	0.87	0.27	0.97	0.14
leaf size	0.56	0.20	0.54	0.33	0.81	0.30	0.30	0.29
inner/outer leaves	0.07	0.20	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.01	0.06
thorns (%)	12.5		33.3		31.6		45.8
zigzag (%)	25.0		10.0		0.0		2.0