Pollination in the Anthropocene: a Moth Can Learn Ozone-Altered Floral Blends
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Pollination in the Anthropocene: a Moth Can Learn Ozone-Altered Floral Blends Brynn Cook 1,2 & Alexander Haverkamp 1,3 & Bill S. Hansson 1 & T’ai Roulston 2 & Manuel Lerdau 4 & Markus Knaden 1 Received: 18 June 2020 / Revised: 9 August 2020 / Accepted: 20 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Insect pollination is essential to many unmanaged and agricultural systems and as such is a key element in food production. However, floral scents that pollinating insects rely on to locate host plants may be altered by atmospheric oxidants, such as ozone, potentially making these cues less attractive or unrecognizable to foraging insects and decreasing pollinator efficacy. We demonstrate that levels of tropospheric ozone commonly found in many rural areas are sufficient to disrupt the innate attraction of the tobacco hawkmoth Manduca sexta to the odor of one of its preferred flowers, Nicotiana alata. However, we further find that visual navigation together with associative learning can offset this disruption. Foraging moths that initially find an ozonealtered floral scent unattractive can target an artificial flower using visual cues and associate the ozone-altered floral blend with a nectar reward. The ability to learn ozone-altered floral odors may enable pollinators to maintain communication with their coevolutionary partners and reduce the negative impacts that anthropogenically elevated oxidants may have on plant-pollinator systems. Keywords Anthropocene . Insect olfaction . Pollution . Pollination . Manduca sexta
Introduction Pollination is integral to maintaining diverse and healthy ecosystems (Kevan 1999), and it strongly contributes to global food production (Klein et al. 2007). The coevolutionary relationship between plants and their pollinators is maintained when plants emit signals that pollinating insects can detect and recognize as belonging to a host plant. These signals include visual cues, such as brightly colored flowers, and olfactory cues – i.e. floral scents (Kunze and Gumbert, 2001). Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10886-020-01211-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Markus Knaden [email protected] 1
Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology, Jena, Germany
2
Department of Environmental Sciences and Blandy Experimental Farm, University of Virginia, Boyce, VA, USA
3
Present address: Laboratory of Entomology, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
4
Departments of Environmental Sciences and of Biology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Because the visual acuity of insect pollinators is limited to a resolution of centimeters to a few meters for most flowers (Kapustjansky et al., 2010) (but see Ohashi and Yahara (2002) for visual detection of flower patches over longer distances), smell is recognized as an important sensory modality guiding pollinators to flowers over long distances. Floral scents consist of an array of vola
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