This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An international study led by researchers from Charles University in Prague (CUNI) and the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences (BC CAS) has mapped how closely flowering plants and their pollinators depend on each other. Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the study shows that climate is the main force behind these patterns, a finding that challenges the classic expectation that pollination becomes more specialized toward the tropics.
Much of the green world depends on animals carrying pollen from flower to flower. Pollination enables plants to reproduce, maintain genetic diversity and produce fruits and seeds that feed countless animals. Flowers, in turn, provide nectar and pollen that sustain an astonishing variety of pollinators.
Bees may be the best known, but flies, beetles, butterflies, moths, wasps and even birds and lizards also fill that role. Our own food supply relies on these partnerships, particularly for many fruit, vegetable, nut and oil crops. Many plants have specialized relationships with particular pollinators, while others are visited by a range of generalist insects.
Many ecologists expect that specialized pollinator-plant relationships are more common in tropical areas due to the greater numbers of interacting plant and animal species there. But this assumption of a latitudinal gradient in specialization remained largely untested due to a lack of appropriate data. "Specialization can be understood as an evolutionary bargain.
A close match can make feeding and pollination very efficient, but it also increases dependence. If one partner disappears or becomes active at a different time, a specialist has fewer alternatives," explains the study's lead author Sailee Sakhalkar, who recently completed her doctorate at CUNI. To find out whether the specialized partnerships are indeed more common in the tropics, researchers brought together 3,415 plant-pollinator networks from 162 studies.
The data set contained more than 110,000 links among 5,343 pollinator and 6,126 plant species from all major terrestrial biomes, from tropical forests and savannas to Mediterranean shrublands, temperate forests and meadows, and subarctic tundra. The study brought together 142 researchers from 32 countries across six continents and represented years of fieldwork around the world. "No single team could study pollination on this scale," says Sakhalkar.
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