Towards to an improved knowledge of species-specific pollinator movement and efficiency

Background/Question/Methods:

Despite the vulnerability of native and cultivated plants to declines in pollination services, little is known about how pollinators forage within human-altered landscapes and what habitats and resource distributions promote or hinder pollinator movement. Use of molecular tools, has revealed that pollinators may travel more extensively within human-altered habitat than natural habitat, but may potentially be ‘waylayed’ in altered habitat, limiting pollinator ability to visit native trees in nearby tropical forest fragments. However, these studies do not examine the dispersal patterns of specific pollinator species, nor do they incorporate pollinator effectiveness into their analyses.

In this study, we examine how species-specific pollinator movement varies across landscapes focusing on the tropical tree Miconia affinis. We conducted a single visit experiment in two regions, one of them representing a well-preserved area and other one with intensive agricultural management. Specifically we hypothesize to that ability to forage across habitat types will be pollinator-species specific, with large-bodied species foraging further in open disturbed habitats and small-bodied species foraging only short distances across both well-preserved and disturbed habitats.

Results/Conclusions:

Pollination success in terms of number of pollinator visits was higher in the well preserved region, despite the diversity and richness of pollinator species visiting M. affiniswas lower.

These preliminary results suggest that human activities are negatively impacting the service provided by pollinators to native tropical plant species. Future work will focus on gene flow promoted by pollinators across habitats differing in their human disturbance levels will shed light on the consequences on the quality of pollination in terms of outcrossing rates and dispersal distances.