Artificial flowers as a tool for investigating multimodal flower choice in wild insects.

ABSTRACT: Flowers come in a variety of colours, shapes, sizes and odours. Flowers also differ in the quality and quantity of nutritional reward they provide to entice potential pollinators to visit. Given this diversity, generalist flower-visiting insects face the considerable challenge of deciding which flowers to feed on and which to ignore. Working with real flowers poses logistical challenges due to correlations between flower traits, maintenance costs and uncontrolled variables. Here, we overcome this challenge by designing multimodal artificial flowers that varied in visual, olfactory and reward attributes. We used artificial flowers to investigate the impact of seven floral attributes (three visual cues, two olfactory cues and two rewarding attributes) on flower visitation and species richnes

SUBMITTER: Chapman KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10659823 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature