Foraging efficiency and size matching in a plant-pollinator community: the importance of sugar content and tongue length.

ABSTRACT: A long-standing question in ecology is how species interactions are structured within communities. Although evolutionary theory predicts close size matching between floral nectar tube depth and pollinator proboscis length of interacting species, such size matching has seldom been shown and explained in multispecies assemblages. Here, we investigated the degree of size matching among Asteraceae and their pollinators and its relationship with foraging efficiency. The majority of pollinators, especially Hymenoptera, choose plant species on which they had high foraging efficiencies. When proboscides were shorter than nectar tubes, foraging efficiency rapidly decreased because of increased handling time. When proboscides were longer than nectar tubes, a decreased nectar reward rather than an in

SUBMITTER: Klumpers SGT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6850310 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature