Empidine dance flies pollinate the woodland geranium as effectively as bees.

ABSTRACT: Most flowering plants species rely on insects for pollination, a successful mutualism allowing them to reproduce over wide areas while flower-visitors are rewarded with food. This association is so conspicuous in the case of bees that other groups of potential pollinators, especially flies, have long been underestimated. However, visitors are not always pollinators. While the importance of flies in plant-visitor networks is now acknowledged, their pollination effectiveness has hardly been investigated. In this study, we assessed the pollination effectiveness of Geranium sylvaticum flower-visitors using single-visit seed set experiments, in a subalpine meadow where flies are predominant. We found that: (i) empidine dance flies were the most frequent visitors of G. sylvaticum; (ii) a single-

SUBMITTER: Lefebvre V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6684995 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature