Premise: Co-occurring plant species that share generalist pollinators often exchange pollen. This heterospecific pollen transfer (HPT) impacts male and female reproductive success through pollen loss and reductions in seed set, respectively. The resulting fitness cost of HPT imposes selection on rep

Because pollen-transport networks tend to vary widely over short periods of time but remain consistent over longer periods of time, it is important to account for study length when characterizing pollen-transport network structure. The study of nocturnal pollen-transport networks independently from

Parents can adjust both the size and number of offspring they produce in order to maximize their own fitness payoff (Smith & Fretwell 1974). Optimal parental investment is dependent in part on likelihood of offspring survival, which is impacted by predation and parasitism. When risk of predation or

Many species of bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are experiencing population declines. In subalpine ecosystems, climate change is altering floral phenology by causing an earlier blooming period, which creates a growing season with sparser resources. Since bumble bees and their floral resources depend on ph

Bumble bees are crucial pollinators in both agricultural and wild ecosystems, and as pollinators they rely almost exclusively on floral resources as a source of food. However, in many natural and agricultural areas there has been a decrease in floral diversity and abundance, which in turn has caused

Global climate change is a threat to ecosystems globally. In subalpine environments, one of the

While plant-pollinator networks are salient markers of biodiversity, their mechanisms remain poorly understood. One theory describing pollination interactions is the Neutral Theory of Biodiversity, which asserts that plant-pollinator interactions are neutral, random processes based on species’ abund

Animals foraging from flowers must assess their environment and make critical decisions about which patches, plants, and flowers to exploit to obtain limiting resources. The cognitive ecology of plant-pollinator interactions explores not only the complex nature of pollinator foraging behavior and de

ABSTRACTExplanations of floral adaptation to diverse pollinator faunas have often invoked visitor‐mediated trade‐offs in which no intermediate, generalized floral phenotype is optimal for pollination success, i.e. fitness valleys are created. In such cases, plant species are expected to specialize o

Many bee species are dietary specialists and restrict their pollen foraging to a subset of the available flowers. However, the reasons for specialization—and the reasons certain plant taxa support numerous specialists—are often unclear. Many bees specialize on the plant family Asteraceae, despite ev

Climate change affects species and their interactions, resulting in novel communities and modified ecosystem processes. Through shifts in phenology and distribution, climatic change can disrupt interactions, including those between mutualists. Mutualisms influence the structure and stability of comm

The addition of nectar to pollen-rewarding plants resulted in modest increases in per-flower pollinator visit duration and pollen transfer, but had no effect on reproduction because, at the place and time the experiment was conducted, plants were not pollen-limited. These results suggest that a poll

AbstractOrganismal traits often influence fitness via interactions with multiple species. That selection is not necessarily predictable from pairwise interactions, such as when interactions occur during different life cycle stages. Theoretically, directional selection during two sequential episodes

This study investigated the impact of water availability and snowmelt timing on the species ​Ipomopsis aggregata. ​We looked to discover if ​I. aggregata’​ s traits were plastic, and if that plasticity was adaptive. The two questions we aimed to answer were: How does timing of snowmelt and level of

Floral rewards are crucial for plant reproductive success and pollinator survival. Although nectar volumes and sugar concentrations have been quantified for many species of flowering plants, many questions remain regarding sources of intraspecific and interspecific variation, including the effects o

1. Competition alters animal foraging, including promoting the use of alternative resources. It may also impact how animals feed when they are able to handle the same food with more than one tactic. Competition likely impacts both consumers and their resources through its effects on food handling, b

Individuals sometimes exhibit striking constancy to a single behaviour even when they are capable of short-term behavioural flexibility. Constancy enables animals to avoid costs such as memory constraints, but can also inflict significant opportunity costs through behaviour–environment mismatch. It

Many plants that bear hidden or recessed floral nectar experience nectar robbing, the removal of nectar by a floral visitor through holes pierced in the corolla. Although robbing can reduce plant reproductive success, many studies fail to find such effects. We outline three mechanistic hypotheses th