BACKGROUND AND AIMS A number of different types of flower-visiting animals coexist in any given habitat. What evolutionary and ecological factors influence the subset of these that a given plant relies on for its pollination? Addressing this question requires a mechanistic understanding of the importance of different potential pollinators in terms of visitation rate (pollinator 'quantity') and ...

According to the concept of pollination syndromes, floral traits reflect specialisation to a particular pollinator or set of pollinators. However, the reproductive biology of endemic, and often specialised, plants may require increased attention as climate change accelerates worldwide. Species of Roscoea endemic to the Himalayan region have striking orchid-like flowers with long corolla tubes, ...

Plants involved in specialized pollinator interactions, such as nursery pollination, may experience trade-offs in their female fitness, as the larvae of their pollinators may also consume seeds produced by the flowers they pollinate. These interactions could potentially shift between mutualism and parasitism, depending on the presence and abundance of both the nursery pollinator and of other po...

Several neotropical orchid genera have been proposed as being sexually deceptive; however, this has been carefully tested in only a few cases. The genus Telipogon has long been assumed to be pollinated by male tachinid flies during pseudocopulatory events but no detailed confirmatory reports are available. Here, we have used an array of methods to elucidate the pollination mechanism in Telipogo...

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...

Pollination is a key ecosystem service as many crops but in particular, fruits and vegetables are partially dependent on pollinating insects to produce food for human consumption. Here we assessed how pollination services are delivered at the European scale. We used this assessment to estimate the relative contribution of wild pollinators to crop production. We developed an index of relative po...

Seed set in banana is influenced by weather, yet the key weather attributes and critical period of influence are unknown. We therefore investigated during floral development for a better perspective seed increase. Three East African highland cooking bananas (EAHBs) were pollinated with pollen fertile wild ‘Calcutta 4′. At full maturity, bunches harvested, ripened, seeds extracted from fruit pul...

BACKGROUND: Barley is one of the main important crops in the world, mainly used for animal feed and malt. OBJECTIVES: This study was conducted to evaluate the comparisons of seed yield and its components, phenological and physiological traits of different barley cultivars under Lorestan environmental condition. METHODS: Current rese...

Novel, specialized systems exploiting bibionid flies, oil-collecting bees, wasps, or crepuscular settling moths as pollen vectors are added to the range of recorded pollination mechanisms in sub-Saharan Africa Iridaceae, while knowledge of the pollination of previously understudied genera such as Aristea, Bahiana, Ferraria, Hesperantha, and Tritoniopsis is expanded. The pollination of 357 speci...