Periodically taken photographs reveal the effect of pollinator insects on seed set in lotus flowers

Abstract

Understanding of pollination systems is an important topic for evolutionary ecology, food production, and biodiversity conservation. However, it is difficult to grasp the whole picture of an individual system, because the activity of pollinators fluctuates depending on the flowering period and time of day. In order to reveal effective pollinator taxa and timing of visitation to the reproductive success of plants under the complex biological interactions and fluctuating abiotic factors, we developed an automatic system to take photographs at 5-s intervals to get near-complete flower visitation by pollinators during the entire flowering period of selected flowers of Nelumbo nucifera and track the reproductive success of the same flowers until fruiting. Bee visits during the early morning hours of 05:00–07:59 on the second day of flowering under optimal temperatures with no rainfall or strong winds contributed strongly to seed set, with possible indirect negative effects by predators of the pollinators. Our results indicate the availability of periodic and consecutive photography system in clarifying the plant-pollinator interaction and its consequence to reproductive success of the plant. Further development is required to build a monitoring system to collect higher-resolution time-lapse images and automatically identify visiting insect species in the natural environment.

Impact of a heterogeneous environment on the population expansion of the harmful plant Iris ruthenica Ker-Gawl. in the high mountain grasslands

“…Flowering phenology at the community level is caused by both exogenous (biotic and abiotic) and endogenous (genetic and phylogenetic) factors (Van Schaik et al, 1993;Linder, 2020). Slope orientation is an important terrain factor that causes differences in solar radiation intensity, resulting in differences in the number and timing of plant flowering, thereby affecting the frequency of pollinator visits and final fruit and seed yields (Dafni, 1992;Olliff-Yang and Ackerly, 2020;Nagai et al, 2022).…”

Utilising affordable smartphones and open-source time-lapse photography for monitoring pollinators

“…Numerous technologies are under investigation for monitoring pollinators. For example, camera systems include off-the-shelf digital products such as Apple iPod nanos (Lortie et al 2012), fixed-lens cameras (Steen 2017), camera traps (Mcelveen & Meyer 2020;Naqvi et al 2022), time-lapse cameras (Edwards et al 2015;Smith et al 2021;Alison et al 2022;Nagai et al 2022), and surveillance cameras (Steen & Thorsdatter Orvedal Aase 2011;Mertens et al 2021), as well as recent programmable microcomputers such as NVIDIA Jetson Nano (Bjerge et al 2022), Raspberry Pi (Ratnayake et al 2021(Ratnayake et al , 2023Droissart et al 2021;Bjerge et al 2023), a Luxonis microcomputer-camera capable of edge AI coupled with a Raspberry Pi (Sittinger et al 2023) and nearinfrared sensors, like those offered by FaunaPhotonics (Rydhmer et al 2022).…”