BACKGROUND AND AIMS Studies of local floral adaptation in response to geographically divergent pollinators are essential for understanding floral evolution. This study investigated local pollinator adaptation and variation in floral traits in the rewarding orchid Gymnadenia odoratissima, which spans a large altitudinal gradient and thus may depend on different pollinator guilds along this gradi...

The most part of hibiscus plants produces short life flowers that last one day. Therefore they are called ephemeral and flower senescence is usually associated with petal in-rolling and abscission. Flowers are well shaped and different organs can be easily separated, these characteristics make the hibiscus a good model system for flower senescence studies. The aim of this work was to identify m...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Herbaceous-shrubby communities in the Gran Sabana (Great Savanna) Plateau of Venezuela grow under non-zonal conditions. We speculated that this would produce specific patterns of reproductive phenology within these different soil-climate-vegetation associations. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that the reproductive phenology patterns of four herbaceous-shrubby communi...

One floral characteristic associated with bat pollination (chiropterophily) is copious pollen production, a pattern we confirmed in a local comparison of hummingbird- and bat-adapted flowers from a cloud forest site in Ecuador. Previous authors have suggested that wasteful pollen transfer by bats accounted for the pattern. Here we propose and test a new hypothesis: bats select for increased pol...

Proserpinaca palustris L. produced juvenile leaves on 8-hour photoperiods, adult leaves on 12-hour photoperiods, and adult leaves and flowers on 14-hour photoperiods. Treatment of plants growing on 8- and 14-hour photoperiods with gibberellic acid caused stem elongation and inhibited flowering. The treated plants on 8-hour photoperiods produced adult-like leaves.

An overview is given of 18 Thysanoptera species found on Ethiopian cut flowers, cuttings and vegetables during import inspection in the Netherlands. Consignments consisted mostly of cut flowers, in total belonging to twelve plant genera. Details on geographical distribution and host plants of the thrips encountered are given, and two are newly described: T. cacuminis sp. n. and T. dezeeuwi sp. ...

Pattern patterns, or phyllotaxis, the arrangements of phylla (flowers, leaves, bracts, florets) in the neighborhood of growth tips, have intrigued natural scientists for over four hundred years. Prominent amongst the observed features is the fact that phylla lie on families of alternately oriented spirals and that the numbers in these families belong to subsets {mj} of the integers defined by t...

To elucidate the taxonomy of the Lecanorchis nigricans Honda, 1931 species complex, the present study investigated the detailed morphology of three L. nigricans varieties in Japan. While L. nigricans var. patipetala Y.Sawa, 1980 and L. nigricans var. yakusimensis T.Hashim., 1990 have often been treated as synonyms of L. nigricans var. nigricans, the present study demonstrates that the three var...

Biological invasions can strongly influence species interactions such as pollination. Most of the documented effects of exotic plant species on plant-pollinator interactions have been observational studies using single pairs of native and exotic plants, and have focused on dominant exotic plant species. We know little about how exotic plants alter interactions in entire communities of plants an...