During buzz pollination, bees use their indirect flight muscles to produce vibrations that are transmitted to the flowers and result in pollen release. Although buzz pollination has been known for >100 years, we are still in the early stages of understanding how bee and floral characteristics affect the production and transmission of floral vibrations. Here, we analysed floral vibrations produced by four closely related bumblebee taxa (Bombus spp.) on two buzzpollinated plants species (Solanum spp.). We measured floral vibrations transmitted to the flower to establish the extent to which the mechanical properties of floral vibrations depend on bee and plant characteristics. By comparing four bee taxa visiting the same plant species, we found that peak acceleration, root mean-squared acceleration (RMS) and frequency vary between bee taxa, but that neither bee size (intertegular distance) nor flower biomass (dry mass) affects peak acceleration, RMS or frequency. A comparison of floral vibrations of two bee taxa visiting flowers of two plant species showed that, while bee species affects peak acceleration, RMS and frequency, plant species only affects acceleration (peak acceleration and RMS), not frequency. When accounting for differences in the transmission of vibrations across the two types of flower, using a species-specific 'coupling factor', we found that RMS acceleration and peak displacement do not differ between plant species. This suggests that bees produce the same initial acceleration in different plants but that transmission of these vibrations through the flower is affected by floral characteristics.
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Patterns of resource use observed at the species level emerge from the way individuals exploit the range of available resources. Hence, accounting for interindividual differences in resource use, such as pollinator use by plants, is essential to advance our understanding of community assembly and persistence. By using finely resolved data on plant–pollinator interactions, we evaluated how interindividual plant variation in pollinator use scales up to affect community structure and dynamics. All co‐occurring plant species comprised specialists interacting with proper subsets of pollinators that visited generalists, and differences in interaction patterns were driven by among‐individual trait variation. Furthermore, the nested structure and feasibility of plant–pollinator communities were maximised at higher levels of interindividual plant variation in traits and pollinator use. Our study sheds light on how pervasive properties of community structure arise from individual‐level processes and contributes to elucidate the importance of preserving intraspecific variation in traits and resource use within populations.
Alien species can drastically disrupt ecological processes such as those involving plant–pollinator interactions, performing central roles that may affect the structure of native pollination networks. However, most studies to date have focused on a single trophic level of alien species, evaluating either the impacts of an alien pollinator or an alien plant species, and have neglected their joint effects on the seasonal dynamics of mutualistic networks. Here, we aim to fill this gap by investigating how alien plant and flower visitor (here used as a proxy for pollinator) species structure temporal networks, and how these species affect the beta‐diversity of interactions across a flowering season. Our study system is located in the South Island of New Zealand, where 68% of the sampled plant species and 14% of the flower visitor species that interact with them are alien. Alien flower visitor species exhibited higher interaction degree, specialization and strength than their native counterparts, while alien plant species showed the opposite pattern. We found that invader complexes (in which alien species interact significantly more with each other than with native species) were established across the season, and interactions involving alien plant species were the main connectors of the temporal networks. Both alien plant and flower visitor species increased total interaction turnover through the flowering season by promoting interaction rewiring in the case of alien plants and by increasing species turnover in the case of alien flower visitors. Synthesis. This study provides one of the first empirical reports of alien species shaping the seasonal dynamics of plant–flower visitor networks. We demonstrate that the presence of alien species may simultaneously lead to a homogenization of plant species composition and increase the diversity of plant–flower visitor interactions through a flowering season. Additionally, we highlight the importance of considering the role of different trophic levels when analysing the impact of alien species in plant–flower visitor communities. Overall, our findings suggest that management strategies should pay particular attention to the timescale at which interactions with alien species dissolve or form, and to the consequences and drivers of such seasonal dynamics.
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