Assessments of the effects of invertebrate herbivores on high-altitude plants have seldom taken into account both mutualistic and antagonistic interactions. To evaluate the effect of herbivores (antagonists) and pollinators (mutualists) on the female reproductive success of the high-Andean perennial herb Alstroemeria umbellata, we separately and simultaneously excluded aphids (herbivores), and ...

Community and biogeographic surveys often conclude that plant-pollinator interactions are highly generalized. Thus, a central implication of the pollination syndrome concept, that floral trait evolution occurs primarily via specialized interactions of plants with their pollinators, has been questioned. However, broad surveys may not distinguish whether flower visitors are actual pollen vectors ...

Honeybees play an important ecological role as pollinators of many plant species, and their products are the basis for a multi-million dollar commercial industry around the world. They are major agricultural pollinators around the world and are keystone pollinators in tropical ecosystems. Pollination has been considered a keystone process to ecosystem function through the facilitation of both p...

Abundance and visitation of pollinator assemblages tend to decrease with altitude, leading to an increase in pollen limitation. Thus increased competition for pollinators may generate stronger selection on attractive traits of flowers at high elevations and cause floral adaptive evolution. Few studies have related geographically variable selection from pollinators and intraspecific floral diffe...

Different pollinators can exert different selective pressures on floral traits, depending on how they fit with flowers, which should be reflected in the patterns of variation and covariation of traits. Surprisingly, empirical evidence in support of this view is scarce. Here, we have studied whether the variation observed in floral phenotypic integration and covariation of traits in Narcissus sp...

Insect pollination benefits over three quarters of the world's major crops. There is growing concern that observed declines in pollinators may impact on production and revenues from animal pollinated crops. Knowing the distribution of pollinators is therefore crucial for estimating their availability to pollinate crops; however, in general, we have an incomplete knowledge of where these pollina...

Mediterranean orchids of the subtribe Orchidinae are highly diverse and display a range of fascinating pollination strategies. Based on observations that orchid-pollinator relationships are often highly specialized and species specific, Darwin and others have argued that selection for different pollinators has been the driving force behind the evolutionary diversification of orchids. This may b...

Despite increasing knowledge about the effects of habitat loss on pollinators in natural landscapes, information is very limited regarding the underlying mechanisms of forest fragmentation affecting plant-pollinator interactions in such landscapes. Here, we used a network approach to describe the effects of forest fragmentation on the patterns of interactions involving the understory dominant p...

Many flowers are visited by a large array of pollinators, often belonging to different taxonomic groups, and many pollinator species visit a wide array of flowers with different morphologies. This observation has led pollination ecologists to question the role played by pollinators in flower diversification and the extent to which floral similarities reflect convergent evolution to specific pol...

The pollination ecology of Eremosparton songoricum (Litv.) Vass., a rare desert species endemic to central Asia, was examined by a series of observational studies and manipulative experiments in two natural populations during 2007–2008. Results showed that the duration of flowering lasted 21 and 23 days, respectively, in Populations A and B from late May to late June in 2008. Anthesis of a sing...