Asynchronous diversification in a specialized plant-pollinator mutualism.
نویسندگان
چکیده
Most flowering plants establish mutualistic associations with insect pollinators to facilitate sexual reproduction. However, the evolutionary processes that gave rise to these associations remain poorly understood. We reconstructed the times of divergence, diversification patterns, and interaction networks of a diverse group of specialized orchids and their bee pollinators. In contrast to a scenario of coevolution by race formation, we show that fragrance-producing orchids originated at least three times independently after their fragrance-collecting bee mutualists. Whereas orchid diversification has apparently tracked the diversification of orchids' bee pollinators, bees appear to have depended on the diverse chemical environment of neotropical forests. We corroborated this apparent asymmetrical dependency by simulating co-extinction cascades in real interaction networks that lacked reciprocal specialization. These results suggest that the diversification of insect-pollinated angiosperms may have been facilitated by the exploitation of preexisting sensory biases of insect pollinators.
منابع مشابه
Evolutionary origins and diversification of mutualism
© Oxford University Press 2015. Published 2015 by Oxford University Press. Molecular phylogenies and ecological associations for approximately two hundred closely related plant species and their specialized, obligate pollinators are depicted without taxonomic names so that we might focus our attention instead on general problems of interpretation. A glance at this web in the tree of life sugges...
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Science
دوره 333 6050 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011