Morphology and Pollination of Flowering Plants

About the Study

Plant structure is hypothesised to enhance fertilisation advance by enhancing pollinator visitation and lowering incorrect pollen transfer from the perspective of plants. Insect visitation intensity is mostly determined by the attractiveness of plants or the net energy intake per unit time from the plant. To improve their attractiveness, rare plants generate far more nectar per blossom than common plants. By removing ineffective pollinators, bloom adds a level of specificity to appeal. Long flowers shield nectar from short-tongued bees and features other than flower depth, as demonstrated by Rabdosia longituba, can influence flower accessibility to bees. Short and dish-shaped flowers are assumed not to have such exclusion mechanisms, but this is not always the case. Short blooms of the Japanese orchid Platanthera nipponica, for example, that are pollinated by short-tongued noctuids, have twisted spurs, which prevent long-tongued sphingids from probing them because only straight spurs can be probed by hovering sphingids long tongues. Neither form of nectar robber can avoid being pierced by primary nectar robbers.

Flowers have intraspecific size variation and different-sized flowers attract different-sized bees within a single plant species. Larger workers of Bombus vagans visited larger blooms of cow vetch, vicia cracca and vice versa. In this plant, assortative mating between similar size classes was discovered. Larger flowers were beneficial because they boosted pollinator visits (greater reward in large flowers), but they had a reduced frequency of precise pollen transmission. The stabilising selection in this plant, which balances the conflicting forces, results in blossom size optimization. Elongating spurs had no substantial negative consequences and longer flowers would be preferred in this circumstance. Plant intraspecific size variation was not addressed in this study. We believe that studying the size variation of both plants and bees at the same time would be helpful. Flower morphology determines the sites at which pollen or pollinia are adhered to pollinator bodies. If pollen deposition sites differ among the plants, numerous plant species can share a single pollinator. It is especially crucial for uncommon plants to receive trapline service if pollinators are shared in this way. However, inter and intraspecific morphological variation among plants does not always imply pollinator species specialisation specific to individual plant species or morphs. The flower morphology of north american pedicularis, for example, showed considerable interspecific variation, but each species was visited by several common bumblebee species. Robbers, parasites and others frequently prey on unique morphological features that appear to be specialised for a single pollinator. Color and odour are two other floral characteristics that attract pollinators. Intraspecific colour morphs have been shown to promote assortive matings and intraspecific odour morphs have also been discovered, each of which is pollinated differently by bumblebees and flies. In classic works on pollination ecology, pollinator symptoms are classified based on colour and odour. Flowering phenology has been extensively researched in connection to pollination competition. Staggered blossoming dates and random connections among plant members in the same guild who share a single pollinator have been documented from various communities. Such broad variety in the results, which is dependent on the communities researched and the bias of the researchers, necessitates a more thorough investigation of the patterns. Author has introduced approaches for statistical testing of data with null models for this purpose. To distinguish across guilds, we require a statistically rational criterion. In many cases, classifying plants according to pollinator syndromes tends to overstate specialisation. In this work, we used cluster analysis to identify plants depending on the frequency of interactions. However we couldn't find unique guilds of plants visited by four of the five bumblebee species. The overlap of flowering times reduces seed set in combinations of two or three plant species, as demonstrated below. At the community level, however, flowering period staggered among plant species appears to be uncommon and if it does exist, it is incomplete. Furthermore, the free allocation of flowering dates by plants, which is a core assumption of null models, is limited by plant phylogeny and environmental requirements. Simultaneous morphology and phenology analysis have been proposed.