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| The puzzle of plant-pollinator interactions |
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 As the summer wraps up in northern Mongolia, the flowers are senescing and some species from the beginning of the season are already setting seeds. There are sharp turning points throughout the season: Early on, the weather is cold and wet; the middle of the season is hot and drier; and the latter third of the season represents an amalgam of hot as well as cold and wet days.We’ve noticed a clear trend in the species that emerge throughout the summer weeks along with an equally clear trend in the temporal distribution of functional characteristics. The flowers tend to be smaller and less fragrant in the beginning of the season, and they have short corolla tube depths. The insects in the beginning tend to be flies, which have short mouth parts. The middle part of the season is filled with large nectar-producing flowers with deep corolla tubes, which are visited by bees and butterflies with long proboscis. The latter part of the season, with the climate a mixture of the earlier two phases, is filled with butterflies, flies and bees, all contributing their services to the pollination of the flowers. The abundance of flowers and the composition of the flowering assemblages help with understanding plant-pollinator interactions. The flowers that overlap in phenology and the functional characteristics of those flowering together all interact to determine the pollinator visitation that we see. Although population-level studies give us insight into some ecological properties of certain species, they cannot account for the possible emergent properties of the populations within an assemblage. Examining one flowering species may give insight to the visitation frequency of a pollinator but cannot give any information about how foraging choices are made. By examining all the flowering species together, we may be able to extract information (like functional characteristics) that the pollinator may process when deciding which flower to visit. Then researchers can revisit more specific ecological questions by scaling back down to the population level (scaling up to the regional or global level is also a possibility). This “entangled bank” that is plant-pollinator interactions presents an intricate puzzle. Pollination is an important service nature provides, which is why it has been well studied. But some fundamental questions have yet to be answered. Human interest in ecology has skyrocketed because of recently documented trends in global change. If we want to be prepared, we have to understand, intimately, what the natural world is changing from to precisely anticipate the path of change. New tools like network analysis are coming to ecology from different fields that add fresh perspectives to old questions. Why do pollinators visit certain flowers? Are there stochastic processes that dictate pollinator interactions with plants? Or do underlying mechanisms determine their interactions? Probably each contributes a piece; hopefully the work I’m doing will contribute to the knowledge we are slowly building to figure out this puzzle. Local (patch) effects may be most significant as predictors of the questions you are addressing; however, working with mammals, I have, in addition to ecological data, used time-series analysis of month x month rainfall data to compare within and between year temporal events (if these are detectable) with population characteristics (in my case, features of life-history). (Source: The New York Times)   Socialize this Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in touch and receive all of TT updates right in your feed reader
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