Reciprocal Coevolution and Plant-Pollinator Interactions

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Interactions between plants and their pollinators has been discussed in the past very frequently. Since the Darwinian times, the topic flourished. There are two aspects that have an important role in this relationship that have been affected by the history. The first being the floral mechanisms and the ecological relationships between plants and the second are the evolutionary processes that affect the pollination (1). As the interest progressed, the approaches became more specific and detailed which led to a more fine scaled insight into plant-pollinator relationship specialization. Due to specific interactions between the plant and its pollinator a terminology of a ‘plant syndrome’ has been introduced, which gives a possibility to distinguish the way a plant has been pollinated (2). Some even suggest that the latitude and high specificity of interactions lead to specialization of the pollination patterns because every region requires varied behavioural patterns (3) as seen in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Relationships between latitude and pollinator specialisation for the community survey and asclepiad data sets. a. Community surveys of plant-flower visitor relationships. Mean number of species of flower visitors per plant species has been log transformed. Pearson’s product moment correlation: r=0.33, df=33, p=0.051. b. Pollinators of asclepiads. Spearman rank correlation: r=0.33, n=91, p=0.002. c. ollinators of asclepiads, corrected for sampling effort. Spearman rank correlation: r=0.09,n=59, p=0.51.

Tylianakis et al (2008) suggested that the pollinator interaction networks might be prone to changes due to the anthropogenic influence. The climate change, habitat fragmentation, pesticide and pollution levels have a potential effect...

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