TY - JOUR
T1 - Floral advertisement and the competition for pollination services
AU - Fishman, Michael A.
AU - Hadany, Lilach
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.
PY - 2015/6/1
Y1 - 2015/6/1
N2 - Flowering plants are a major component of terrestrial ecosystems, and most of them depend on animal pollinators for reproduction. Thus, the mutualism between flowering plants and their pollinators is a keystone ecological relationship in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Though plant-pollinator interactions have received considerable amount of attention, there are still many unanswered questions. In this paper, we use methods of evolutionary game theory to investigate the co-evolution of floral advertisement and pollinator preferences. Our results indicate that competition for pollination services among plant species can in some cases lead to specialization of the pollinator population to a single plant species (oligolecty). However, collecting pollen from multiple plants - at least at the population level - is evolutionarily stable under a wider parameter range. Finally, we show that, in the presence of pollinators, plants that optimize their investment in attracting vs. rewarding visiting pollinators outcompete plants that do not.
AB - Flowering plants are a major component of terrestrial ecosystems, and most of them depend on animal pollinators for reproduction. Thus, the mutualism between flowering plants and their pollinators is a keystone ecological relationship in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Though plant-pollinator interactions have received considerable amount of attention, there are still many unanswered questions. In this paper, we use methods of evolutionary game theory to investigate the co-evolution of floral advertisement and pollinator preferences. Our results indicate that competition for pollination services among plant species can in some cases lead to specialization of the pollinator population to a single plant species (oligolecty). However, collecting pollen from multiple plants - at least at the population level - is evolutionarily stable under a wider parameter range. Finally, we show that, in the presence of pollinators, plants that optimize their investment in attracting vs. rewarding visiting pollinators outcompete plants that do not.
KW - Allocation of resources
KW - Floral advertisement
KW - Nonlinear asymmetric evolutionary games
KW - Plant-pollinator coevolution
KW - Reproductive assurance
KW - Reward
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84929394879&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.biosystems.2015.01.006
DO - 10.1016/j.biosystems.2015.01.006
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AN - SCOPUS:84929394879
SN - 0303-2647
VL - 132-133
SP - 35
EP - 42
JO - BioSystems
JF - BioSystems
ER -