DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Pollinator behavior and the maintenance of females in gynodioecious populations

授粉是生物学中研究最多、生态学上最重要的互惠共生现象之一。传粉者种类繁多，在授粉行为和授粉效率方面差异很大。许多植物有不同的性别，但人们很少了解传粉者群落的变化如何对雄花、两性花和雌花产生不同的影响。例如，吃花粉的传粉者可能会忽视雌花。此外，传粉者的分布和丰度随着时间的推移而变化，这是自然和人类活动的结果。利用计算机模拟和田间实验，本研究将直接测量传粉者群落对北美和欧洲不同传粉者群体(包括采粉蜜蜂、采蜜蛾和食籽昆虫)雌株和两性株种子生产的影响。这项研究的学术价值在于，它将加深我们对传粉者群落变化对植物适合性的影响的理解，以及我们对有利于两性植物或雌雄异株植物的条件的理解。这项研究将在几个领域产生更广泛的影响。这有潜在的经济影响，因为许多农作物需要昆虫授粉才能产生足够的产量。为这个项目创建的计算机程序也将被用来开发免费提供的教育软件，模拟授粉过程，供大学生物课堂使用。最后，该项目将把研究生培养成一名科学家，并进一步扩大美国和捷克研究人员之间的国际合作。

Pollination is one of the best studied and ecologically most important mutualisms in biology. Pollinators are diverse and vary widely in their behavior and efficiency in pollinating flowers. Many plants have separate sexes, yet it is poorly understood how changes in the pollinator community could differentially affect male, hermaphrodite, and female flowers. Pollinators that eat pollen, for example, may neglect female flowers. Furthermore, the distribution and abundance of pollinators vary over time naturally and as a result of human activity. Using computer simulations and field experiments, this study will directly measure the consequences of pollinator communities on seed production of female and hermaphrodite Silene vulgaris plants exposed to different groups of pollinators, including pollen collecting bees, nectar collecting moths, and seed eating insects, in North America and in Europe. The intellectual merit of this research is that it will develop our understanding of the consequences of changes in pollinator communities on plant fitness, and our understanding of the conditions that favor plants that are hermaphroditic or which have separate sexes. This study will have broader impacts in several areas. There are potential economic implications because many agricultural crops require insect pollination to produce adequate yields. Computer programs created for this project will also be used to develop freely available educational software modeling pollination processes for use in university biology classes. Finally, this project will develop a graduate student as a scientist and further expand an international collaboration between US and Czech Republic researchers.