Abstract
Carnivorous plants use insects not only as prey for nutrient supplementation but also as pollinators for sexual reproduction. Consequently, when these plants have flowers and trap leaves simultaneously, there is a risk that they will trap mutualistic pollinators. Pollinator trapping can have various fitness consequences for carnivorous plants depending on which factors are limiting their fitness at a given time. Thus, plants that are pollen limited will be negatively impacted by pollinator trapping, whereas those that are nutrient limited will benefit from this. Carnivorous plants have evolved diverse characteristics to manage pollinator trapping based on these fitness-limiting factors. In this chapter, I discuss these characteristics with a particular focus on visual and chemical traits resulting from the production of secondary metabolites and biological factors to gain an understanding of the evolutionary ecology of pollinator trapping in carnivorous plants.
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Tagawa, K. (2020). Pollinator Trapping in Carnivorous Plants. In: Merillon, JM., Ramawat, K. (eds) Co-Evolution of Secondary Metabolites. Reference Series in Phytochemistry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76887-8_56-1
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