Pollinator Diversity and Foraging Specialization

昆虫传粉是许多野生植物和农作物繁殖周期中的一个关键步骤，而且往往是有限的。因此，了解授粉物种丧失的影响对于健康、正常运作的生态系统的长期可持续性以及我们农业企业的安全和生产力至关重要。这个项目的重点是传粉者的花卉保真度，即一个传粉者物种与一个单一植物物种在短期内相互作用的密切程度。这种保真度对植物至关重要，因为低保真度的传粉者在一次觅食之旅中访问了许多不同的植物物种，从而在单个植物之间转移了错误类型的花粉，减少了它们产生的种子数量。这个项目将调查传粉者物种之间的竞争与传粉者花的保真度正相关的假设。如果这一假设是真的，正如理论和试点数据所表明的那样，传粉者物种或种群的丧失可能会降低剩下的传粉者的花朵保真度，从而导致植物繁殖的意外减少。为了测试这一点，我们将在科罗拉多州落基山脉的亚高山草甸进行操纵实验，在那里我们有选择地-但暂时和非致命地-从一块地块中移除丰富的传粉者物种，并评估操纵前后其他传粉者的花朵保真度。这些传粉者移除对植物繁殖的影响也将得到初步评估。此外，该项目在实验室的试验性觅食试验中调查了花朵的保真度，在实验室中，传粉者和植物的多样性和丰富性可以得到控制。这项工作可能会对传粉者损失对植物繁殖的影响产生影响，特别是考虑到世界各地传粉者的持续减少。除了研究结果，该项目的更广泛影响包括其保护影响；培训博士后研究员；改进落基山生物实验室的花粉和蜜蜂参考资料收集；为四年级学生开发授粉课堂模块，将在亚特兰大资源不足的学校实施并广泛传播。

Insect-mediated pollination is a critical, and often limiting, step in the reproductive cycle of many wild plants and crops. Thus, understanding the effects of losing pollinator species is a question of central importance for the long-term persistence of healthy, functioning ecosystems and for the security and productivity of our agricultural enterprise. This project focuses on pollinator floral fidelity, or how closely a single pollinator species interacts with a single plant species over the short term. Such fidelity is of key importance to plants, because pollinators with low fidelity visit many different plant species in a single foraging trip, thus transferring the wrong kind of pollen between individual plants and reducing the number of seeds they produce. This project will investigate the hypothesis that competition between pollinator species is positively related to pollinator floral fidelity. If this hypothesis is true, as is suggested by theory and pilot data, loss of pollinator species or populations could reduce floral fidelity in the pollinators that remain, thereby leading to unanticipated reductions in plant reproduction. To test this, manipulative experiments will be conducted in subalpine meadows in the Colorado Rockies where we selectively - but temporarily and non-lethally - remove an abundant pollinator species from a plot, and assess the floral fidelity of other pollinators both before and after the manipulation. The effects of these pollinator removals on plant reproduction will also be preliminarily assessed. In addition, this project investigates flower fidelity in experimental foraging trials in the lab, where pollinator and plant diversity and abundance can be controlled. This work may have implications for the effects of pollinator losses on plant reproduction, especially given ongoing pollinator declines around the world.Beyond the research results, the broader impacts of this project include its conservation implications; the training of a post-doctoral research fellow; improvements to the pollen and bee reference collections at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory; and development of a pollination classroom module for fourth graders that will be implemented in under-resourced schools in Atlanta and widely disseminated.