Beetles reward woodland wildflowers that make more and sweeter nectar
McPeek SJ, Pattisall KM, Iii EDB
Pollinators
The wildflowers carpeting a shady forest floor are competing for beetle visits, and the plants with the richest nectar are the ones leaving the most seedlings behind, which is worth knowing if you're planting a native woodland garden.
Fly Poison is a white woodland wildflower pollinated by beetles. Researchers found that plants offering more nectar, and nectar with more sugar, ended up producing more seed. Beetles mostly judged each plant on its own, but a plant's advantage from making extra nectar grew when its neighbors were also generous.
Key Findings
Nectar volume at the whole-patch level shaped how often pollinators visited, but selection on nectar traits mostly fit beetles treating plants as separate individuals rather than as groups.
A neighbor contrast effect of multilevel selection was detected: selection on nectar volume was more negative or flat in patches with low mean nectar production and more positive in patches with high mean nectar production.
Across the forest, selection favored individual plants with high-quantity, high-quality nectar.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Beetles pollinating Fly Poison, a woodland wildflower, prefer plants with more and sweeter nectar, so those plants set more seed. Beetles mostly treat each plant as an individual, though the payoff of making lots of nectar shifts a bit depending on how generous the neighboring plants are.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Individual and multilevel selection on nectar traits in a plant-pollinator mutualism.
In consumer-resource species interactions, consumers can play a role in shaping the evolution of their own resources by acting as an agent of selection on the consumed species' traits. Many consume...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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