DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Flowers as hubs of nectar-microbe diversity and dispersal in flower visitor networks

论文研究：花卉作为花蜜微生物多样性和花卉访客网络传播的中心

• 批准号: 1501620
• 负责人: Jay Rosenheim
• 金额: $ 1.97万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-15 至 2017-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1501620&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: DISSERTATION; RESEARCH; Flowers; hubs; nectar

Many plants can only be fertilized when pollen is deposited on flowers by flying insects such as bees, wasps, beetles, flies, and butterflies. While these insects move around gathering nectar and pollen from flowers, they also tend to move around microbes such as yeast, bacteria, and viruses that can impact the plant or other flower visitors. For example, some of these microbes infect crops through the flowers, some infect honeybee and bumblebee colonies, and others affect whether or not an insect is attracted to the flower. While it is known that these floral microbes are moved around by insects, and affect the plant they land on, little is known about how predictable the distribution of floral microbes are in flowering plant communities. This research seeks to understand how the pattern of insect visitation to flowers affects the distribution of microbes on flowers. It is important to learn this because it could help address management of plants and insects that are critical to our food and fiber production as well as native ecosystems. Nectar-inhabiting microbes can alter floral attractiveness to pollinators and thus shape the success of pollination services. Since nectar microbes are primarily flower-visitor dispersed, they have great potential to affect and be affected by flower visitor network structure. However, the interactions of plants with their flower visitors and nectar microbes have yet to be considered in a network framework. The aim of this project is to test the hypothesis that hub plant species (plant species that have very high diversity of flower visitors) are also hubs of floral microbe diversity and dispersal in a native plant community. Network hubs are known to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of pathogen spread within animal species ("super-spreaders"). In flower visitor networks, hub plant species might function as super-spreaders of floral microbes between plant species. The project goals are to construct a dataset of plants, their flower visitors, and nectar microbe composition as well as perform a manipulative experiment on a species with high variation in flower visitors, Aquilegia formosa, in a high elevation wet meadow plant community. Simulation models will be used to evaluate the effects of visitor diversity and visitation frequency on the diversity of nectar microbes at the plant level. The researchers will empirically test the hypothesis that certain flowers are hubs of nectar microbe diversity.

许多植物只有当花粉被昆虫如蜜蜂、黄蜂、甲虫、苍蝇和蝴蝶附着在花上时才能受精。虽然这些昆虫四处移动，从花朵中收集花蜜和花粉，但它们也倾向于在微生物周围移动，如酵母，细菌和病毒，这些微生物可能会影响植物或其他花访客。例如，这些微生物中的一些通过花朵感染作物，一些感染蜜蜂和大黄蜂群体，另一些影响昆虫是否被吸引到花朵上。虽然已知这些花卉微生物被昆虫四处移动，并影响它们降落的植物，但对花卉微生物在开花植物群落中的分布可预测性知之甚少。本研究旨在了解昆虫访花的模式如何影响花上微生物的分布。了解这一点很重要，因为它可以帮助解决对我们的食物和纤维生产以及本土生态系统至关重要的植物和昆虫的管理问题。 花蜜中的微生物可以改变花朵对传粉者的吸引力，从而影响授粉服务的成功。由于花蜜微生物主要是花访客分散，他们有很大的潜力，影响和花访客网络结构的影响。然而，植物与它们的花访客和花蜜微生物的相互作用还没有被认为是在一个网络框架。该项目的目的是测试的假设，枢纽植物物种（植物物种，具有非常高的花访客的多样性）也是花微生物的多样性和分散在本地植物群落的枢纽。已知网络枢纽是造成动物物种内不成比例的病原体传播的原因（“超级传播者”）。在访花者网络中，中心植物物种可能充当植物物种之间花微生物的超级传播者。本计画的目的是建立一个植物、访花者与花蜜微生物组成的资料集，并以高海拔湿润草甸植物群落中访花者变异性高的物种福尔摩沙为对象，进行操作性实验。模拟模型将用于评估游客多样性和访问频率对植物水平花蜜微生物多样性的影响。研究人员将根据经验验证某些花朵是花蜜微生物多样性中心的假设。