Category Archives: Pollination

The mystery of what pollinates poinsettias – China Diary 3

Is it too early to talk about Christmas? Not if you’re interested in pollinators and pollination! The mid-winter festival has featured quite a number of times on my blog over the years, especially in relation to the iconic plants that represent this time of year in Northern Europe, and what one might describe as the ‘cultural biodiversity‘ of Christmas. The final plant that I included in that last post was the poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) – this is how I described it:

In many ways this is an unusual plant to have such a strong cultural association with Christmas: it’s a mildly toxic species of spurge from tropical Mexico that was introduced to North America in the 19th century, then subsequently to Europe. However its festive connotations date back to the earliest period of Spanish colonisation in the 16th century, so it’s older than some…other Christmasy traditions…

I also discuss poinsettia, and specifically its pollination, in my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship – this is what I say in the chapter called ‘Urban flowers for urban birds’:

Just occasionally one sees a bird-pollinated tree planted in a city. The most common in my experience are various banksias in Australia, and the Royal Poinciana (from Madagascar) and the African Tulip Tree in the urban tropics and subtropics elsewhere in the world. I’ve also occasionally encountered large specimens of Poinsettia: when they are given free rein they are a much more impressive plant than their Christmas cousins. The vivid red bracts that surround the clusters of flowers suggest that they may be hummingbird-pollinated in their native Central America, but as far as I know their pollination ecology has not been studied.

Here at the Kunming Botanic Garden there’s several quite large specimens of poinsettia that, as I write, are in full flower, their red bracts a signal to pollinators that can be seen for quite a distance. However we’ve not seen any of the local sunbirds or white-eyes visit the flowers, and, as I said in the book, as far as I know the pollination ecology of poinsettia has never been studied in the wild. Close inspection of the flowers in the garden revealed that almost all of the nectaries had at least one nectar-collecting ant sticking out from it, their prominent backsides a deterrent to the Asian Honey Bees (Apis cerana) that also wanted a piece of the action.

Based on the position of the nectaries in relation to the stamens, if the plant is hummingbird-pollinated then the pollen is likely to end up under the chin of the bird. That’s certainly been described in other plant-bird pollination systems. But it does not have to be birds that move the pollen around – red flowers are also associated with other kinds of pollinators, for example butterflies and beetles. But until someone in Mexico does the necessary field work, we’ll just have to speculate.

Seeds have power far beyond their size – China Diary 2

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In the image above, the three glass tubes on the right contain different cultivated varieties of soybean (Glycine max), one of the world’s most important (and controversial) legume crops. The tube on the left contains the seeds of what is considered the wild ancestor of soybean (Glycine soja). Archaeological evidence suggests that by about 5,000 years ago farmers in several areas of Asia had artificially selected varieties that had much bigger seeds than the wild type. I like this image because it’s a great demonstration of the power of humans to positively influence the food that we eat – and the power of those seeds to affect us via our diets and farming methods.

Of course it’s not just soybean that’s been subject to this sort of artificial selection – we’re encountering many other species and varieties of beans at the various farmer’s markets we’re visiting here in Yunnan:

Many of these beans require pollinators such as bees to initiate or at least enhance the crop, as we found in our recent study of soybean as part of the SURPASS2 project.

I took the main image last week when I had a tour of the Germplasm Bank at the Kunming Institute of Botany, a really impressive facility that stores both seeds in deep freeze and living plants in tissue culture. It’s one of the ways in which we can help to conserve the genetic diversity of wild and cultivated plants. Here are a few more photographs from that visit:

Dr Jie Cai, the manager of the seed bank, kindly hosted the tour and introduced the facility:

Seeds are stored at about -20C in huge, security-controlled freezers:

Collected seeds are first cleaned, sorted, and then counted – a laborious task that requires patience:

Samples of seeds are also germinated at various points to assess how well they are responding to storage:

Plants with seeds that do not respond well to being stored, such as many orchids and bamboos, are grown in tissue culture:

The building also hosts the genetic sequencing facility, another extremely impressive set of laboratories in which progress of sequencing the Chinese flora can be seen in real time:

New study just published: The effect of elevation, latitude, and plant richness on robustness of pollination networks at a global scale

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During the 2020 lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I coordinated an international network of pollination ecologists who used standardised methods to collect data in their gardens. I blogged about it at the time – see here and here for instance – and also put up a post when the data paper from that work was published.

Several research groups are now working with that huge data set and interrogating it for answers to a wide range of questions. The first group to actually publish a paper from the data is a largely Chinese set of researchers from the Key Laboratory of Plant Resources, Conservation and Sustainable Utilization, at the South China Botanical Garden in Guangzhou, assisted by Kit Prendergast and myself.

In this paper we’ve considered how robust these plant-pollinator networks are to simulated extinctions of species, and how this is affected by the elevation, latitude, and plant species diversity of the network.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the study:

Wang, X.-P., Ollerton, J., Prendergast, K.S., Cai, J.-C., Tong, M.-Y., Shi, M.-M., Zhao, Z.-T., Li, S.-J. & Tu, T.-Y. (2024) The effect of elevation, latitude, and plant richness on robustness of pollination networks at a global scale. Arthropod-Plant Interactions (in press) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11829-024-10056-7

If you can’t access it and need a PDF, please send me a request via my Contact page.

Here’s the abstract:

Plant-pollinator interactions play a vital role in the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem function. Geographical variation in environmental factors can influence the diversity of pollinators and thus, affect the structure of pollination networks. Given the current global climate change, understanding the variation of pollination network structure along environmental gradients is vital to predict how global change will affect the ecological interaction processes. Here, we used a global plant-pollinator interaction data collection by the same sampling method at the same period to explore the effects of elevation, latitude, and plant richness on the structure and robustness of pollination networks. We analyzed a total of 87 networks of plant-pollinator interactions on 47 sites from 14 countries. We conducted a piecewise structural equation model to examine the direct and indirect effects of elevation, latitude, and plant richness on the network robustness and analyzed the function of network structure in elucidating the relationship between robustness and these gradients. We found that plant richness had both positive effects on robustness under random and specialist-first scenarios. Elevation, latitude, and plant richness affected network connectance and modularity, and ultimately affected network robustness which were mediated by nestedness under specialist-first and random scenarios, and by connectance under the generalist-first scenario. This study reveals the indirect effects of elevation, latitude, and plant richness on pollination network robustness were mediated by nestedness or connectance depended on the order of species extinctions, implying that communities with different pollination network structures can resist different extinction scenarios.

A new review of ‘Birds & Flowers’ in the Journal of Pollination Ecology

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The reviews of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship are starting to appear in blogs, magazines and journals. The latest, by Diane Campbell, has just been published in the Journal of Pollination Ecology and I’m so pleased that it was positive! I’ve only met Diane a couple of times at conferences but I have a lot of respect for her work. The review is fair and balanced, and gratifyingly enthusiastic, for example:

In this delightful book, [Ollerton] describes the ways that birds and flowers interact. As in his previous book, Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, [he] takes a deeply personal approach to the subject. He combines anecdotes from his research travels around the world, to mountains of Kenya and Tanzania, the Andes of Peru, Brazil, and Nepal, among other places, with his contributions to, and masterful knowledge of, the recent literature…

The review is free to read and download from Journal of Pollination Ecology. I’m so glad that people are enjoying the book – if you’ve bought or borrowed a copy, please do leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Reusing Plant-Pollinator Datasets – a free WorldFAIR webinar on 18th April

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A message from Dr Debora Drucker, WorldFAIR Agricultural Biodiversity Case Study Lead:

Registration is open to our contribution to the WorldFAIR webinar series – “Reusing Plant-Pollinator Datasets: a Global Perspective with Guidelines and Recommendations inspired by Pilot Studies from Africa, the Americas and Europe”.

It will be held on April 18 at 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm (Times in UTC) – https://worldfair-project.eu/event/the-worldfair-webinar-series-reusing-plant-pollinator-datasets-a-global-perspective-with-guidelines-and-recommendations-inspired-by-pilot-studies-from-africa-the-americas-and-europe/

We will present results from Deliverables 10.2 & 10.3, with focus on our pilot studies:

Drucker, D., Salim, J. A., Poelen, J., Soares, F. M., Gonzalez-Vaquero, R. A., Ollerton, J., Devoto, M., Rünzel, M., Robinson, D., Kasina, M., Taliga, C., Parr, C., Cox-Foster, D., Hill, E., Maues, M. M., Saraiva, A. M., Agostini, K., Carvalheiro, L. G., Bergamo, P., Varassin, I.; Alves, D. A., Marques, B., Tinoco, F. C., Rech, A. R., Cardona-Duque, J., Idárraga, M., Agudelo-Zapata, M. C., Marentes Herrera, E. Trekels, M. (2024). WorldFAIR (D10.2) Agricultural Biodiversity Standards, Best Practices and Guidelines Recommendations (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10666593

Drucker, D. P., Salim, J. A., Poelen, J., Soares, F. M., Gonzalez-Vaquero, R. A., Devoto, M., Ollerton, J., Kasina, M., Carvalheiro, L. G., Bergamo, P. J., Alves, D. A., Varassin, I., Tinoco, F. C., Rünzel, M., Robinson, D., Cardona-Duque, J., Idárraga, M., Agudelo-Zapata, M. C., Marentes Herrera, E., Taliga, C., Parr, C.S., Cox-Foster, D., Hill, E., Maués, M.M. Agostini, K. Rech, A.R., Saraiva, A. (2024). WorldFAIR (D10.3) Agricultural biodiversity FAIR data assessment rubrics (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10719265

We reserved a good amount of time for Q&A – I hope to see you there and have a nice discussion!

The flower that’s pollinated by birds, bees….and the wind!

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In my new book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship I spend a bit of time discussing the idea of the bird pollination syndrome that we refer to as ‘ornithophily’, its limitations, and the fact that it has two distinct meanings that are often conflated. One of the problems with ornithophily, and indeed all of the syndromes, is that historically it’s sometimes blinkered scientists to the extent that they only look at the flower visitors that are “right” for the syndrome, ignoring the rest or dismissing them as “secondary pollinators”, a term I dislike.

Why do I dislike that term? Because it fails to capture the complexity of flower-pollinator interactions and relegates an important component of plant reproduction to a subsidiary role. I could go on about this at some length, but if you’re interested in discovering more, look at pages 62-65 of Birds & Flowers. There I contrast the classical Most Effective Pollinator Principle with the equally valid (but much less well studied) Least Effective Pollinator Principle, with a segue into one of my favourite tracks from Led Zeppelin’s second album: What is and What Should Never Be.

But back to the real subject of this post – a flower that corresponds to the classical bird pollination syndrome BUT is also pollinated by bees and (very surprisingly) wind! It’s such an interesting paper by Brazilian ecologists Amanda Pacheco, Pedro Bergamo & Leandro Freitas – here’s the reference and a link to the study:

Pacheco, A., Bergamo, P.J. & Freitas, L. (2024) An unexpected case of wind pollination: ambophily in an ornithophilous tropical mountaintop Orobanchaceae. Plant Systematics and Evolution 310, 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-024-01890-6

For over 100 years the classical pollination syndromes have acted as a framework for understanding the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator interactions. But we’ve long known that while they can be a useful shorthand, they do not fully reflect the complexity of how pollination systems evolve. That shouldn’t surprise us because, as I point out in my two recent books, we have data (of any quality) on no more than 10% of the 350,000 or so species of flowering plants!

In addition, those plants for which we do have good data are NOT a random subset of the flowering plants: they have been specifically chosen by researchers because they look to be good systems with which to address particular ecological or evolutionary questions.

Which is fine, but we MUST recognise that this imposes significant restrictions on our understanding of the biodiversity of plant-pollinator interactions. The authors of this paper expressed it very well when they wrote that assumptions about:

“predictability may cause researchers to take for granted that only birds pollinate ornithophilous flowers, hindering research on the contribution of other vectors.”

To which I’d add: it also hinders our understanding of how these interactions evolve over long time scales and across multiple populations.

An obvious question is: how frequent are these sorts of complex pollination systems, involving different pollen vectors of an apparently specialised flower? The answer is that we simply don’t know, because most researchers would have not gone into this level of detail. So a huge congratulations to the authors for a great study – I hope it stimulates others to look beyond the ‘expected’ pollinators of flowers.

Photos: Nathália Susin Streher from the original paper.

More from the WorldFAIR Project: Agricultural biodiversity FAIR data assessment rubrics for plant-pollinator interactions

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The final deliverable from the WorldFAIR Project with which I’m involved has recently been published and can be freely downloaded from Zenodo by following the link below. The report is called “Agricultural biodiversity FAIR data assessment rubrics” and in it we present the results from a series of six pilot studies that adopted the FAIR* standards and our recommendations from the previous report.

This document complements the previous one by giving examples and setting out guidelines that allow researchers and practitioners to ensure FAIRness in their plant-pollinator interaction data.

Here’s the full reference:

Although this is the last formal deliverable from our WorldFAIR work package, it’s not the final output that we have planned. I’ll report back on the journal paper(s) that we are writing as and when they are published.

*Findable, Accessible, Interoperable & Reusable (or sometimes Reproducible)

Can coffee plantation design boost both productivity and sustainability? A new study says YES!

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One of the most productive research collaborations in which I’ve had the pleasure to be involved has been with André Rodrigo Rech in Brazil. It started when he was a postgrad working on his PhD, and has now continued as André has developed into fully-fledged academic with his own research group. That productivity has been fueled by a lot of coffee, of course, as you’ll know if you’ve read my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society!

Our most recent paper concerns coffee production in Brazil and how the design and management of plantations can both support wild bee populations AND increase the quality and quantity of the crop. One of the lead authors Gudryan Baronio has written a post about the work over on The Applied Ecologist blog – here’s the link: https://appliedecologistsblog.com/2024/02/26/can-coffee-plantation-design-boost-both-productivity-and-sustainability/

Here’s the reference – if you want a PDF of the paper, please send me a message via my Contact page:

Pereira Machado, A.C., Baronio, G., Soares Novaes, C., Ollerton, J., Wolowski, M., Natalina Silva Lopes, D. & Rech, A. (2024) Optimizing coffee production: Increased floral visitation and bean quality at plantation edges with wild pollinators and natural vegetation. Journal of Applied Ecology (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Animal pollination is important for more than 75% of agricultural crops, including coffee, whose productivity can increase with adequate pollination. Bees, including many solitary species, are diverse pollinators, with around 85% of them considered more effective than honeybees in pollen transfer. We assessed the coffee plantation and its surrounding vegetation for solitary bee nesting throughout the coffee flowering season and measured their impact on coffee productivity.
We installed collection stations with trap nests inside a coffee plantation, on the border and inside the native vegetation in a farm in Diamantina, MG, Brazil. We used 10 weekly monitored replicates at least 1 km apart. We evaluated fruiting by autogamy in relation to natural pollination and used the increase in fruit set from pollinators to calculate the farmer’s monetary gain. We recorded bee visits to the exposed flowers during coffee flowering considering both on the edge and inside the coffee plantation. Ripe fruits were dried, counted and weighed.
We discovered 132 solitary bee nests outside the plantation, with 54% containing coffee pollen grains, indicating coffee as an essential resource for bees even outside the crop area. More bee visits occurred at the coffee plantation’s edge, resulting in increased fruit production, denser fruits, and rounder fruits in that area. Bagged flowers produced consistent seeds in all locations. The farmer could earn an extra US$1736.37 per hectare if the entire area received the same level of pollination contribution from bees as observed at the coffee border.
Synthesis and applications. Our study emphasises the key role of pollinators in coffee production and their impact on fruit and seed characteristics. Bee visits were more frequent on border areas, emphasising their reliance on natural nesting sites. Bee-mediated pollination positively affected fruit traits and self-pollinated fruits in plantation borders had reduced mass. Solitary bee nesting was primarily observed in native vegetation, underlining its importance for bee populations. Pollen composition in nests varied with proximity to coffee plantations, indicating landscape vegetation influences pollinator foraging. These findings support optimising coffee plantation design by preserving native vegetation to increase coffee yields and conserve biodiversity.

Just published – WorldFAIR Agricultural Biodiversity Standards, Best Practices and Guidelines Recommendations for plant-pollinator interactions

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One of the projects in which I’m currently involved is the WorldFAIR project. Funded by the European Commission, WorldFAIR is exploring how to make data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable – across a range of different disciplines in the sciences and humanities.

My involvement is specifically with Work Package 10, which is focused on data standards for plant-pollinator interactions, particularly as they relate to pollination of agricultural crops.

I’m delighted to say that the second deliverable from that work – a set of standards, best practices and guidelines recommendations – is now available for free download if you follow the link in this reference:

Drucker, D., Salim, J. A., Poelen, J., Soares, F. M., Gonzalez-Vaquero, R. A., Ollerton, J., Devoto, M., Rünzel, M., Robinson, D., Kasina, M., Taliga, C., Parr, C., Cox-Foster, D., Hill, E., Maues, M. M., Saraiva, A. M., Agostini, K., Carvalheiro, L. G., Bergamo, P., … Trekels, M. (2024) WorldFAIR (D10.2) Agricultural Biodiversity Standards, Best Practices and Guidelines Recommendations (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10666593

Here’s the first paragraph of the summary:

The WorldFAIR Case Study on Agricultural Biodiversity (WP10) addresses the challenges of advancing interoperability and mobilising plant-pollinator interactions data for reuse. Previous efforts, reported in Deliverable 10.1 – from our discovery phase – provided an overview of projects, best practices, tools, and examples for creating, managing and sharing data related to plant-pollinator interactions, along with a work plan for conducting pilot studies. The current report presents the results from the pilot phase of the Case Study, which involved six pilot studies adopting standards and recommendations from the discovery phase. The pilots enabled the handling of concrete examples and the generation of reusable materials tailored to this domain, as well as providing better estimates for the overall costs of adoption for future projects.

Read my author interview and get a 25% discount off ‘Birds & Flowers’, ‘Pollinators & Pollination’ and other books from Pelagic Publishing!

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I recently did a short interview with Pelagic Publishing’s marketing person, Sarah Stott, which you can read here: https://pelagicpublishing.com/blogs/news/birds-and-flowers-author-interview.

On that page you can sign up to Pelagic’s newsletter (which I STRONGLY recommend, because they produce some great natural history and science books, and not just mine!) and by doing so you can receive a 25% discount on all orders.

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