Solitary bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea) as connectors in pollination networks: the case of Rhodanthidium
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Original article
Solitary bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea) as connectors in pollination networks: the case of Rhodanthidium Daniel ROMERO1 , Concepción ORNOSA1 , Pablo VARGAS2 , Jens M. OLESEN3 1
Department of Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution; Faculty of Biological Sciences, University Complutense of Madrid, José Antonio Nováis Street, 12, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040, Madrid, Spain 2 Real Jardín Botánico, CSIC, Madrid, Spain 3 Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Received 16 September 2019 – Revised 14 February 2020 – Accepted 30 March 2020
Abstract – Bees (Apoidea) are the main pollinator group in Mediterranean ecosystems, having a dominant role as connectors of modules (groups of species tightly linked in pollination networks), but little is known about the role of particular species. Here, we analyse data from four Iberian networks, and we pay special attention to the role played by the solitary snail-shell bee Rhodanthidium sticticum (Fabricius, 1787) in shaping network modularity. Our results show that R . sticticum is a pollination generalist that acts as an important connector of modules, strongly influencing the topology of its networks. We also examined 51 networks from all over the world to determine the modular role of other Anthidiini species. Anthidiini were present in 14 of these networks and another Rhodanthidium species, but also two Anthidium species, played a role as connectors in their respective networks. connector / pollination network / Rhodanthidium / solitary bees
1. INTRODUCTION Within an ecological space, plant-flower visitor mutualistic interactions combine into pollination networks (Delmas et al. 2019, Herrera 2019). Pollination network studies may encompass all pollinator species within a given study area and period (‘total pollination networks’) or slice out certain groups of special interest, e.g. birds (Rodríguez-Rodríguez and Valido 2008, Traveset et al. 2015). Here, we focus upon the bees. Their network role, as a group, has recently been addressed in Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-020-00765-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Corresponding author: D. Romero, [email protected] Manuscript editor: Alexandra Klein
Mello et al. (2013), Tucker and Rehan (2016), Gresty et al. (2018) and Jauker et al. (2019). Thus, by now, we know that bees are commonplace in pollination networks and that they connect different modules, i.e. tightly linked network groups (Olesen et al. 2007), but the ecological role of particular species for network topology remains uncertain. This information could be very valuable for the development of network conservation plans, in particular those which focus upon ecosystem functionality. In general, there is plenty of knowledge on the relationship between phenotypic traits and topological roles, as species morphology frequently modulates network structure by both facilitating and hindering possible interactions (Olesen et al. 20
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