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Dioecious Clusia nemorosa achieves pollination by combining specialized and generalized floral rewards

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Abstract

Plants often combine multiple strategies to achieve pollen transfer. The dioecious Clusia nemorosa (Clusiaceae) produces floral resin, a specialized reward for resin-collecting bees. It also exhibits floral automimicry with female flowers mimicking male flowers in order to attract pollen-collecting insects. We observed the hourly visitation frequency and behaviour of bee visitors on two rock savanna sites in French Guiana. The major strategy in pollen transfer and the variation in visitation rates among visitor species were examined. We hypothesized that the visitation rate will vary between the floral sexes and degree of this variation will differ between the two-reward systems. We found no evidence for visits being exclusively related to resin collection, which we expected to be the principal strategy in pollen transfer. Deceit pollination appeared to have minor importance and seemed to be locally associated with the site, where demand for pollen was greater. Flower visits that probably facilitated most pollen transfer, combined resin and pollen. The pollinators involved in this system collected pollen from male flowers and resin from female flowers. The fruit set was not particularly low (44.19%) so offering different rewards by different flower genders has not constrained reproductive success in this system. Pronounced variation in visitation rates between sexes was not related to the pollination mechanisms but to the demand for the two rewards. Overall demand for pollen was greater than demand for resin. Female flowers were visited much less frequently than male flowers. Peak pollen collection occurred in the morning, i.e., as soon as the resource was available, while resin was collected throughout the day. There was a local variability in demand for the two resources because both the visitation rate and the behaviour of foraging bees varied between the two observation sites.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Heiko Hentrich and Holger Teichert for their helpful comments on the manuscript and Frederick Rooks for his advice on English usage. Thanks are also due to Pierre Charles-Dominique and his French colleagues for their hospitality and support during our work. This study was supported by the Fund for Neotropical Plant Research of The New York Botanical Garden, the Grant Agency of the Charles University (152/2005), the Czech Science Foundation (206/03/H137) and by the institutional project AV0Z60050516 (Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic). The experiments conducted in this study comply with the current laws of France and the Czech Republic.

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  1. Department of Mycorrhizal Symbioses, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Zámek 1, 25243, Průhonice, Czech Republic

    Blanka Vlasáková

  2. Institute for Experimental Ecology, Ulm University, Albert-Einstein-Allee 11, 89069, Ulm, Germany

    Stefan Jarau

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  1. Blanka Vlasáková
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  2. Stefan Jarau
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Correspondence to Blanka Vlasáková.

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Vlasáková, B., Jarau, S. Dioecious Clusia nemorosa achieves pollination by combining specialized and generalized floral rewards. Plant Ecol 212, 1327–1337 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-011-9908-0

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