What appears to be a place of safety becomes a maze, as an orchid manipulates its visitor.
Tag - floral traits
Fi Gennu
Indirect effects of drought on bumblebee pollination of common charlock
How does drought influence floral traits of Sinapis arvensis and how does this affect visitation by bumblebee pollinators?
William Salter
‘Two households, both alike …’? How differences between sexes varies with time in flowering plants
‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ is famously the opening line of Romeo & Juliet. How alike houses Montague and Capulet actually are is debatable, but what is clear is that plants with two households can be...
Liam Elliott
Botanists find out who’s the daddy
Growing a fruit is only one way of passing your genes on to the next generation if you’re a plant. You could also send pollen to another plant. But what factors influence siring success? Dorothy Christopher and...
The role of ultraviolet reflectance and pattern in the pollination system of Hypoxis camerooniana
It's the colours you cannot see that are important to the bees of Cameroon.
The role of pollinator preference to maintain pollen colour variation
You're familiar with the idea that pollinators look at flower colour, but what about pollen colour? New research shows pollinators may have a much more significant influence than thought.
Male reproductive success and floral trait evolution in animal-pollinated plants
More than 85% of flowering plant species require the services of foraging animal pollinators to transfer male gametes (pollen) to stigmas of potential mates. The vast majority (95-99%) of pollen grains produced by a...
Alex Assiry
The rewards of chasing nectar
We know that flowers entice pollinators with nectar, but how much and what causes a flower to produce as much or as little nectar as it does. In this guest post, Amy Parachnowitsch, Jessamyn Manson and Nina Sletvold...
Guest Author
Evidence for asymmetrical hybridization despite pre- and post-pollination reproductive barriers between two Silene species
Co-flowering species may undergo interspecific hybridization if they are closely related and share pollinators. However, a series of reproductive barriers between species can prevent interspecific gene flow, making...
AoBPLANTS
Specialisation and modularity of plant-pollinator networks
Modularity is the tendency of certain species to consistently interact with each other. It is a ubiquitous and important property of ecological networks that can determine the level of specialisation of species within...
botanyone
Plants with similar colours attract different pollinators
Different pollinator groups (bees, ants, wasps, flies, beetles and butterflies) preferentially visit flowers of certain colours. Interestingly, these colour preferences match the predictions of the pollination syndrome...
Variability in style deflexion and its fitness consequences
Variability of floral traits within individuals is usually regarded as developmental noise and not considered in studies of adaptive evolution. Dai et al. measure style deflexion, a floral trait in Passiflora incarnata...
Buzz pollination, floral traits and pollen release
Bumble-bee workers assort themselves among Pedicularis species according to size, adjusting their buzzing behavior in relation to the species' floral traits
Why would a plant make its pollination less efficient?
The special issue on pollinator-driven speciation is available with free access now. We covered a few of the papers last year, but now they’re all free. One of the more puzzling papers is Novel adaptation to...
Alun Salt