Theresa M. Culley* Stephen G. Weller Ann K. Sakai Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California–Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. *e-mail: [email protected] Although much emphasis has been placed on specialist pollination systems, attention is shifting towards systems in which plants are visited by a variety of pollinators [1,2]. Until recently, examples of generalist pollinatio...

• Understanding how pollination affects plant reproductive success and how changes in pollination service affect plant populations, communities and ecosystems is of increasing concern. Yet supplemental hand-pollination traditionally used to assess pollen limitation is prohibitive for large-scale comparative work. Moreover, it does not differentiate between quality and quantity aspects of pollen...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Cucumis melo subsp. agrestis (Cucurbitaceae) is cultivated in many African regions for its edible kernels used as a soup thickener. The plant, an annual, andromonoecious, trailing-vine species, is of high social, cultural and economic value for local communities. In order to improve the yield of this crop, the first step and our aim were to elucidate its breeding system. M...

Silene alba, a perennial, dioecious plant, produces flowers that open in the evening and can remain open and receptive to pollination for up to 5 d, though in hot and dry conditions the flowers will wilt during the day only to reopen night after night. In the field, it is visited by two different kinds of pollinators with differential success: moths visit the flowers at night, and their movemen...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Successful invasive plants such as Araujia sericifera usually either are capable of automatic self-pollination or maintain pollinator services by having generalized pollination systems to make use of local pollinators in the invaded range. Alternatively, plants must co-opt new pollinators with similar morphology to native pollinators or reproduce asexually. We aimed to docum...

Tropical biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions have become heavily eroded through habitat loss. Animal-mediated pollination is required in more than 94% of higher tropical plant species and 75% of the world's leading food crops, but it remains unclear if corridors avert deforestation-driven pollination breakdown in fragmented tropical landscapes. Here, we used manipulative resource ex...