Novel Consequences of Bird Pollination for Plant Mating

Abstract

Pollinator behaviour has profound effects on plant mating. Pollinators are predicted to minimise energetic costs during foraging bouts by moving between nearby flowers. However, a review of plant mating system studies reveals a mismatch between behavioural predictions and pollen-mediated gene dispersal in bird-pollinated plants. Paternal diversity of these plants is twice that of plants pollinated solely by insects. Comparison with the behaviour of other pollinator groups suggests that birds promote pollen dispersal through a combination of high mobility, limited grooming, and intra- and interspecies aggression. Future opportunities to test these predictions include seed paternity assignment following pollinator exclusion experiments, single pollen grain genotyping, new tracking technologies for small pollinators, and motion-triggered cameras and ethological experimentation for quantifying pollinator behaviour.

Conservation of old individual trees and small populations is integral to maintain species' genetic diversity of a historically fragmented woody perennial

“…Few comparisons are available with other long‐lived endemics on granite outcrops, but studies in bromeliads as well as the common granite endemic Kunzea pulchella have revealed low to moderate levels of genetic diversity (Barbará et al, ; Lexer et al, ; Tapper et al, ). Bird pollination has been suggested to have evolved in some historically fragmented populations as a mechanism conserving or enhancing heterozygosity by facilitating wide pollen dispersal and high levels of outcrossing (Hopper, ; Krauss et al, ). However, our results show that bird pollination may not necessarily correspond to high levels of genetic diversity or genetic connectivity among isolated populations.…”

Comparison of the ecology and evolution of plants with a generalist bird pollination system between continents and islands worldwide

“…Previous analyses have established that plants pollinated by specialist nectarivorous birds are most common in evergreen tropical and subtropical mountain forests, where the abundance of insect pollinators is comparatively low (Abrahamczyk & Kessler, ; Krauss et al, ). Specialist nectarivorous bird pollination has therefore been interpreted as an adaptation to a more reliable pollinator group.…”

Effectiveness of camera traps for quantifying daytime and nighttime visitation by vertebrate pollinators

“…Importantly, camera traps also provide untested potential for a detailed quantification of visitation rates and behavior, enabling new insight into the consequences of pollinator behavior for plant mating. The variation in foraging strategies and social behaviors that affect pollinator movements can have profound effects on plant mating (Krauss et al., ; Mitchell, Irwin, Flanagan, & Karron, ), making quantification of pollinator behavior important for understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences of different pollinator groups. In this way, camera trap data can be fully utilized to explicitly test ideas or hypotheses, rather than merely estimate abundance or density.…”

“…Camera traps are likely to be particularly effective in vertebrate pollination systems, which includes members of ca. 500 of the 13,500 vascular plant genera, and more than 1,000 bird, bat, marsupial, rodent and reptile species (Anderson, Kelly, Robertson, & Ladley, 2016;Krauss, Phillips, Karron, Roberts, & Hopper, 2017;Proctor, Yeo, & Lack, 1996). For example, camera traps have recently provided new evidence for rodent pollination (Hobbhahn & Johnson, 2013;Hobbhahn, Steenhuisen, Olsen, Midgely, & Johnson, 2017;Lombardi, Peter, Midgley, & Turner, 2013;Melidonis & Peter, 2015;Zoeller, Steenhuisan, Johnson, & Midgley, 2016), and for detecting promiscuous pollination by flying foxes, sugar gliders, birds, and insects of an Australian baobab (Groffen, Rethus, & Pettigrew, 2016).…”