Lecture series in Ecology and Environmental Research SS 2021

How do plants talk to their pollinators? An insight on pollination, flower temperature and community ecology

Recently plant pollination and its interaction has emerged as one of the interesting research topics in pollination ecology and society due to their important role in food productions and their decline. Many of the research currently concentrate about the protection of resources required for them. However, I aimed at understanding, how the pollinator sees the world. Our research focused on bridging local, regional and global scales on how plant-pollinator attraction and interactions work (see Dyer, Jentsch et al 2021 Frontiers of Plant Sciences), how different groups of pollinators perceive the world which is different from us. Further, my talk will provide a preview of how the increase in floral temperature affects pollinator behavior due to changing climate. Moreover, I will be presenting the biogeography of floral color across the different elevation region of the world. Particularly, human and insect blue color distribution at a different community. We thus provide new perspectives emphasizing that, whilst humans view blue as a less frequently evolved color in nature, but we conclude that short-wavelength reflecting blue flowers are indeed frequent in nature when considering the color vision and preferences of bees.

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