Title：
Floral trait variation across individual plants within a population enhances defense capability to nectar robbing
Authors：
Corresponding
Author：
Shuang Tie, Yongdeng He, Amparo Lazaro, David W. Inouye, Youhao Guo*, Chunfeng Yang*
Pubyear：
2023
Title of
Journal：
Plant Diversity
Paper
Code：
Volume：
45
Number：
Page：
315-325
Others：
Classification：
Source：
Abstract：
Floral trait variation may help pollinators and nectar robbers identify their target plants and, thus, lead to differential selection pressure for defense capability against floral antagonists. However, the effect of floral trait variation among individuals within a population on multi-dimensional plant-animal in-teractions has been little explored. We investigated floral trait variation, pollination, and nectar robbing among individual plants in a population of the bumble bee-pollinated plant, Caryopteris divaricata, from which flowers are also robbed by bumble bees with varying intensity across individuals. We measured the variation in corolla tube length, nectar volume and sugar concentration among individual plants, and evaluated whether the variation were recognized by pollinators and robbers. We investigated the in-fluence of nectar robbing on legitimate visitation and seed production per fruit. We found that the primary nectar robber (Bombus nobilis) preferred to forage on plants with long-tubed flowers, which produced less nectar and had lower sugar concentration compared to those with shorter corolla tubes. Individuals with shorter corolla tubes had comparatively lower nectar robbing intensity but higher visitation by legitimate visitors (mainly B. picipes) and higher seed production. Nectar robbing signifi-cantly reduced seed production because it decreased pollinator visits. However, neither pollination nor seed production differed between plants with long and short corolla tubes when nectar robbers were excluded. This finding suggests that floral trait variation might not be driven by pollinators. Such vari-ation among individual plants thus allows legitimate visitors and nectar robbers to segregate niches and enhances population defense against nectar robbing in unpredictable conditions.Copyright & COPY; 2022 Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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