Does Floral Nectar Depth Correlate With Pollinator Proboscis Length?

Abstract

Pollination is essential for maintaining global biodiversity and our world’s food supply. Climate change is causing inefficiencies in plant-pollinator networks, so understanding the factors that determine which pollinators visit which plants will be exceedingly important for a sustainable future. Our study examined the effects of floral nectar depth on visitor proboscis length in a dry subalpine meadow at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. We conducted 46.5 hours of pollinator observations in addition to using historic observations in the same plant-pollinator community and historic measurements on the floral nectar depths and pollinator proboscis length, to test if pollinator visitation was affected by size thresholds or size matching. We found that flowers with greater nectar depths were visited by pollinators with longer proboscis, and that the meadow’s pollinators tend to visit flowers which have similar nectar depths to their proboscis length. Our results suggest that size-matching influences plant-pollinator networks. As a result, short-tongued pollinators may be particularly vulnerable to the loss of flowers with shallow nectar depths and long-tubed flowers to pollinators with long proboscis.

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