Defensive Bee and Wasp Mimicry by Orchid Flowers
A variety of arthropods (e.g., flies, spiders, butterflies) are known to mimic bees or wasps as defense from predators (Cott 1940; Wickler 1968; Edmunds 1974; Plowright and Owen 1980; Rothschild 1984; Howarth and Edmunds 2000; Bain et al. 2007; Chittka an
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Defensive Bee and Wasp Mimicry by Orchid Flowers
A variety of arthropods (e.g., flies, spiders, butterflies) are known to mimic bees or wasps as defense from predators (Cott 1940; Wickler 1968; Edmunds 1974; Plowright and Owen 1980; Rothschild 1984; Howarth and Edmunds 2000; Bain et al. 2007; Chittka and Osorio 2007; Penney et al. 2012) (Fig. 61.1). Bees and wasps may be aggressive and sting, and by this deter many animals including herbivores (Breed et al. 2004). General visual bee-mimicry and specific volatile mix chemical mimicry by flowers in order to imitate solitary female bees or wasps for the sake of pollination is well known in several orchid genera, e.g., the Mediterranean genus Ophrys (Fig. 61.2), the Australian genera Cryptostylis and Chiloglottis, and the south African Disa. This mimicry has been shown to attract solitary male bees or wasps, which are their species-specific pollinators. The visual and chemical signals are considered to be a type of deceptive pollination mechanism based on mimicry for the exploitation of perceptual biases of animals (Dafni 1984; Schiestl 2005). Accumulating evidence indicated that the chemical-olfactory mimicry of female bee pheromone mix, first described by B. Kullenberg (Vereecken et al. 2009), and not the visual one (as originally proposed) is the dominant species-specific deceiving attractant of the solitary male bees to flowers of Ophrys and other orchid taxa (Kullenberg 1950, 1956, 1961; van der Pijl and Dodson 1966; Dafni 1984; Ayasse et al. 2000; Schiestl et al. 2000; Schiestl 2005). The flower fragrance mimics exactly the structure and composition of the specific sexual pheromone exerted by the females of the pollinating male bees (Schiestl 2005; Jürgens and Shuttleworth 2016). Following the various hypotheses that plants employ defensive animal mimicry described above and below, Lev-Yadun and Ne’eman (2012) proposed reconsidering and experimentally testing the almost forgotten, more than a centuryold anti-herbivory role of visual bee-mimicry discussed by Rolfe (1910) and briefly mentioned by van der Pijl and Dodson (1966). Mr. E. Kay Robinson, in a letter to the newspaper “Daily News”, was the second to propose that visual bee-mimicry by orchid flowers has not evolved for pollinator attraction, but rather to deter grazing © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Lev-Yadun, Defensive (anti-herbivory) Coloration in Land Plants, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42096-7_61
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Defensive Bee and Wasp Mimicry by Orchid Flowers
Fig. 61.1 A vaspmimicking spider from southern Germany
cows and other animals (cited in Rolfe 1910). In this connotation, Wickler (1968) mentioned, without giving the reference, that Brown expressed in 1831 an opinion that Ophrys species scare off insects with their bee-mimicking flowers. While Rolfe (1910) dismissed the defensive mimicry hypothesis, which was later practically forgotten, Lev-Yadun and Ne’eman (2012) argued that it may partly explain the visual bee- or wasp-mimicry by orchid flowers, especially in the view t
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