Floral colour diversity in plant communities, bee colour space and a null model (original) (raw)

1999, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Evolutionary biologists have long hypothesized that the diversity of £ower colours we see is in part a strategy to promote memorization by pollinators, pollinator constancy, and therefore, a directed and e¤cient pollen transfer between plants. However, this hypothesis has never been tested against a biologically realistic null model, nor were colours assessed in the way pollinators see them. Our intent here is to ¢ll these gaps. Throughout one year, we sampled £oral species compositions at ¢ve ecologically distinct sites near Berlin, Germany. Bee-subjective colours were quanti¢ed for all 168 species. A model of colour vision was used to predict how similar the colours of sympatric and simultaneously blooming £owers were for bees. We then compared £ower colour di¡erences in the real habitats with those of random plant communities. We did not ¢nd pronounced deviations from chance when we considered common plants. When we examined rare plants, however, we found signi¢cant divergence in two of the ¢ve plant communities. At one site, similarly coloured species were found to be more frequent than expected, and at the other two locations, £ower colours were indistinguishable from a random distribution. These results ¢t theoretical considerations that rare plants are under stronger selective pressure to secure pollination than common plants. Our study illustrates the power of linking such distinct biological traditions as community ecology and the neuroethology of bee vision.

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