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Why background colour matters to bees and flowers

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Abstract

Flowers are often viewed by bee pollinators against a variety of different backgrounds. On the Australian continent, backgrounds are very diverse and include surface examples of all major geological stages of the Earth’s history, which have been present during the entire evolutionary period of Angiosperms. Flower signals in Australia are also representative of typical worldwide evolutionary spectral adaptations that enable successful pollination. We measured the spectral properties of 581 natural surfaces, including rocks, sand, green leaves, and dry plant materials, sampled from tropical Cairns through to the southern tip of mainland Australia. We modelled in a hexagon colour space, how interactions between background spectra and flower-like colour stimuli affect reliable discrimination and detection in bee pollinators. We calculated the extent to which a given locus would be conflated with the loci of a different flower-colour stimulus using empirically determined colour discrimination regions for bee vision. Our results reveal that whilst colour signals are robust in homogeneous background viewing conditions, there could be significant pressure on plant flowers to evolve saliently-different colours to overcome background spectral noise. We thus show that perceptual noise has a large influence on how colour information can be used in natural conditions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Elinya Dyer for assistance in collecting rocks and measuring spectra, as well as discussions about the project. We thank Chris Monteith for comments and discussions of the study design and mathematical style. MS thanks the School of Media and Communications RMIT for a postdoctoral fellowship to facilitate research. AGD thanks the ARC for QEII fellowship (project number DP0878968) to conduct the initial phases of the research. This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project Numbers DP130100015, DP160100161).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Zoë Bukovac, Mani Shrestha & Alan Dorin

  2. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia

    Mani Shrestha, Jair E. Garcia & Adrian G. Dyer

  3. School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Martin Burd

  4. Department of Physiology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Adrian G. Dyer

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  1. Zoë Bukovac
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  5. Alan Dorin
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Correspondence to Adrian G. Dyer.

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Bukovac, Z., Shrestha, M., Garcia, J.E. et al. Why background colour matters to bees and flowers. J Comp Physiol A 203, 369–380 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-017-1175-7

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