Or, rather, something to ponder as you finish your meal, maybe with a coffee. Whatever your food(s) of choice, you need the right equipment – e.g. teeth – to cope with it (unless it’s a liquid or intravenously...
Ant–plant associations are widely diverse and distributed throughout the world, leading to complex ecological networks. Regarding ant–plant mutualism, ant pollination is a very rare interaction and few studies have...
Myrmecochory is a mutualistic interaction in which ants disperse the seeds of plants. The defining feature of such plants is the elaiosome, a lipid rich seed appendage that serves as a reward to the ants. It is...
Plants rely on seed dispersal vectors — for example, animals, wind and water — to move across the landscape. Through dispersal, plants may experience reduced exposure to competition, predation and parasitism; colonize...
Interactions between flowering plants and their pollinators are known to be responsible for part of the tremendous diversity of the angiosperms, currently thought to number at least 350,000 species. Using a new database...
What happens when a flower is eaten or pollinated? A study in the American Journal of Botany shows one interaction can impact in an unexpected way on another.
Flowering time is shifting with climate change. Pollinators may respond differently to changes in temperature and moisture than the flowers they visit, resulting in a phenological mismatch between species. Assessing...
Nursery pollination is an unusual plant–insect interaction in which an insect is both pollinator and seed-predator. Depending on the abundance of the nursery pollinator and of other pollinators this interaction can...
Nursery pollination systems are excellent biological models to study how obligated plant-insect mutualisms function and have evolved. Jácome-Flores et al. investigated whether and how the spatial distribution, sex, and...
Polyploidy alters plant genomes, phenotypes, and abiotic interactions. The effects of polyploidy on plant-biotic interactions however are less well known. One important plant-biotic interaction is the legume-rhizobia...