Disentangling the path of pollinator attraction in temporarily colored flowers
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Disentangling the path of pollinator attraction in temporarily colored flowers Samuel Boff 1,2
&
Jessica Amaral Henrique 1 & Anna Friedel 3 & Josué Raizer 1
Received: 7 July 2020 / Accepted: 8 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Plants may use different strategies to attract pollinators in long distance (e.g. floral display) and in short distance (e.g. ratio between differentially colored flowers) scales. The Verbenaceae Lantana canescens Kunth is a wide spread species in open sites of the Brazilian Pantanal wetland. Individuals of this generalist species can produce a variable number of open inflorescences with yellow and white flowers that are organized in whorls. In this study we tested the hypothesis that increased floral display (long distance attraction) and the ratio between yellow and white flowers (short distance attraction) enhances the number of pollinator species and individuals. We observed flower visitors and calculated floral parameters in 38 plots of 1 m2 each, that contained a varying number of flowering L. canescens individuals. Non-metric multidimensional scaling and Bray-Curtis distances were used to account for flower visitor composition and the relative visitation rate, respectively. We used a structural equation model to test the power of each predictor variable on the visitation rate and a covariance analysis to disentangle the effect of each independent variable on the frequency of plant-pollinator interactions. We found that the number of flower visitors and the visitation rate increased with increasing number of inflorescences. Disentangling long and short distance attraction indicated that the number of inflorescences (per plot) and the number of yellow flowers (yellowing effect) contributed most to flower visitation at long and short distance, respectively. Keywords Floral display . Lantana canescens . Pantanal wetland . Honey bees . Neotropical region . Pollinator attraction
Introduction Flowering plant species differ in floral trait combinations and trait complexity and use these as strategies to attract pollinators for reproduction (Endress 1996). Two mechanisms that have been suggested to enhance visitation rate by pollinators are: i) increasing long distance perception through the production of aromatic volatiles (Heiduk et al. 2017) with increased Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42690-020-00323-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Samuel Boff [email protected] 1
Faculty of Biology and Environmental Sciences, Federal University of Grande Dourados, Dourados 79840-970, Brazil
2
Present address: Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany
3
Institute for Biology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, 06120 Halle (Saale), Germany
flower size (Glaettli and Barrett 2008) and number of flowers (Grindeland et al. 2005); ii) improving resource detection by potential pollinators at a short
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