(Press-News.org) A new paper in Annals of Botany, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that pollination can have a dramatic effect on how plants grow and change. The study shows that when plants and pollinators become uncoordinated (even for a brief time) it can change who reproduces best and change plant diversity. The paper offers new insights into how evolution works in real time.
Pressures on pollination behavior can fluctuate over reproductive seasons, influencing which plants animals pollinate. Changes in the interaction between plants and pollinators within a single flowering season show how such interactions vary on short timescales, potentially affecting the healthiness of plant populations.
Pollinators, including birds, bats, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, wasps, and bees, play a crucial role in the diversification of flowering plants through their influence on natural selection. Plant–pollinator interactions are key drivers of variation in the external characteristics of plants and play a huge role in shaping a range of floral traits including flower size, floral display, and flowering time. Several pollination components influence selection patterns, such as how long pollinator animals spend at the plant, how intensely they pollinate, and their behavior when pollinating.
Researchers here identified levels of plant-pollinator temporal overlap—the time when insects are mostly likely to pollinate flowers—for the floral oil-producing Amazonvine in the dry tropical forest Parque Nacional do Catimbau in Pernambuco, northeastern Brazil, between February and April of 2020. In this system, bees collect oil secreted by floral oil glands through petal grasping and leg extensions, leaving characteristic visitation marks that help track pollination events.
The Amazonvine cannot reproduce on its own and depends on pollination from oil-collecting bees. Researchers collected information about the plant population at two separate times. The first sampling time occurred within the species’ usual peak flowering period, when the population exhibited a high number of flowers, but pollinator visitation was very scarce. After monitoring the population continuously, the investigators sampled the plants again four weeks later, at a time of high pollinator activity.
This revealed a shift in both direction and strength of fitness-flower size relationship that accompanies different flowering times, resulting in a weak selection in overall reproductive season. The researchers found that bees picked plants with larger flowers that reproduced more during peak flowering, but fitness was higher in plants with smaller flowers during the second observation time. This is because peak- and late-flowering plants experienced different intensities of pollinator visitation. Only 7.5% of the flowers on peak-flowering plants (out of 134 flowers) showed marks of visitation indicating pollination, whereas this percentage increased to 93.6% in late-flowering plants (out of 140 flowers).
By estimating fitness functions under different intensities of flower–pollinator overlap, the investigators demonstrated that selection patterns in a plant population can be influenced strongly, and quite quickly. Though the results show that pollinators have a strong preference for plants with large flowers, changes in the overlap between the time the bees visited and when the plants flowered led to meaningful selection differences.
Observers tend to think about climate-driven phenological mismatches across years, but this paper shows that within-season mismatches (between peak and late blooming flowers) can still drive change plant fitness. As climate change disrupts seasonal cues, asynchronies between plants and pollinators will likely increase. This study suggests how such changes could affect plant reproduction and evolution.
“Our findings show that even within a single flowering season, temporal mismatches between plants and pollinators can shift how traits like flower size relate to reproductive success,” said the paper’s lead author, Liedson Carneiro. “These short-term dynamics may influence evolutionary outcomes, help maintain trait diversity, and prevent rapid trait change in plant populations.”
The paper, “Evolutionary consequences of flowering-pollinator asynchrony: The case of a floral oil-producing plant and its oil-collecting bees,” is available (at midnight on August 6th) at https://academic.oup.com/aob/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/aob/mcaf126.
Direct correspondence to:
Liedson Carneiro
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biological Sciences
East Tennessee State University
Johnson City, TN
liedson.tavares@gmail.com
To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Daniel Luzer
daniel.luzer@oup.com
END
Pollination behavior has huge role in plant evolution
2025-08-06
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Predicting respiratory disorder mortality in dogs
2025-08-06
Respiratory disorders in dogs can quickly become critical and are reported to be the second leading cause of cardiac arrest in canines. Therefore, it is necessary to take appropriate measures according to each patient’s condition. This, however, requires rapid and accurate disease severity assessments. In human medicine, scoring systems that incorporate physical examinations and blood tests results with respiratory function assessments exist, and enable more accurate severity assessments. In contrast, there are only a few reports on severity assessments that use tests other than respiratory function evaluations in veterinary medicine. Further, these evaluations usability ...
Living in hurricane affected areas could increase mortality of older people by 9% years after disaster
2025-08-06
Hurricanes and related natural catastrophes like flooding are becoming more severe and more frequent around the world. Older people are especially at risk, but relatively little is known about long-term health effects. In 2012, the north-east US was hit by Hurricane Sandy, which resulted in unusable transportation systems, destruction of homes, power loss, and more than 100 casualties.
But what about the people who continue living in hurricane-mangled areas? Now, researchers in the US have investigated if ...
New risk calculator can better predict stroke to direct the best prevention
2025-08-06
BURLINGTON—Researchers at the University of Vermont have developed a more precise way to assess stroke risk in people with atrial fibrillation (A-Fib), a condition that affects 10.5 million Americans and is a leading cause of stroke.
Their findings, published August 6 in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, show that adding simple blood tests to an existing risk calculator can help physicians better determine who truly needs anticoagulant medications—powerful drugs that prevent strokes but ...
Social media boosts news diversity amid traditional media decline
2025-08-06
New research by the University of South Australia finds a silver lining to the struggling media landscape in the face of the digital age, revealing that social media is enhancing the diversity of news the community receives.
The study found that Australian news is more diverse on social media, as the traditional media landscape – particularly quality local journalism – has become increasingly unsustainable.
Social media is the most popular way for Australians to find and consume news, ...
HOXB13 in cancer development: molecular mechanisms and clinical implications
2025-08-06
HOXB13, a B-class homeobox transcription factor, sits at the hub of developmental gene networks yet has emerged as a double-edged sword in human cancer. While indispensable for embryonic patterning and androgen-dependent organogenesis, its expression is frequently hijacked or extinguished by epigenetic, mutational and post-translational events that drive tumour initiation, progression and therapy resistance. Across more than twenty malignancies, the protein acts as either oncogene or tumour suppressor, depending on tissue context, interacting partners and mutational ...
Research shows Alaska early quake warning system could provide critical seconds
2025-08-06
A proposed earthquake early warning system could have provided several communities an alert of 10 seconds or more ahead of strong shaking from the magnitude 7.3 quake that occurred south of Sand Point near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula in mid-July.
That analysis is provided by Alex Fozkos of the Alaska Earthquake Center’s systems team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
“Individuals in Sand Point could have expected approximately 10 seconds of warning time before ...
Researchers discover universal laws of quantum entanglement across all dimensions
2025-08-06
A team of theoretical researchers used thermal effective theory to demonstrate that quantum entanglement follows universal rules across all dimensions. Their study was published online on August 5, in Physical Review Letters as an Editors’ Suggestion.
“This study is the first example of applying thermal effective theory to quantum information. The results of this study demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, and we hope to further develop this approach to gain a deeper understanding of quantum entanglement structures,” ...
Emeishan mantle plume created 400 km gas-rich carbonate belt in Sichuan Basin
2025-08-06
Beneath the modern Sichuan Basin lies a geological masterpiece orchestrated by the Emeishan mantle plume 262 million year ago. A landmark study published in the Journal of Palaeogeography (Chinese Edition) uncovers how plume-driven tectonics shattered a Permian carbonate ramp into a complex platform system, creating a 400-kilometer-long dolostone hydrocarbon reservoir belt now pivotal to China’s energy exploration. Led by Prof. Yuan Haifeng (Chengdu University of Technology) and Dr. Zhang Benjian (PetroChina Southwest ...
On-board camera footage offers bird’s eye glimpse into seabird flights and feeding behaviour
2025-08-06
Scientists have captured unique on-board footage of Indian Ocean seabirds speeding just above the waves to catch flying fish on the wing.
The footage, obtained by lightweight bird-borne cameras formed part of a study of the lives of seabirds in the waters around the remote archipelago they call home.
Two red-footed boobies - a tropical cousin of the more familiar gannet – were carefully fitted with the tiny cameras to record how they catch their favourite food; flying fish. Of 15 capture attempts, 14 were towards flying fish while in flight and one was an underwater dive.
This is the first such on-board footage revealing that flying ...
Why birds on the edge stay there: Study sheds light on murmuration mysteries
2025-08-06
They twist and turn across the sky in dense, whirling formations—murmurations of birds that seem to move as one, captivating watchers and puzzling scientists for decades. Now, a new analysis suggests that one of the most mysterious features of these aerial displays—the behaviour of birds at the edges—may stem from accident rather than intent.
A study examining the flocking patterns of jackdaws has found that the sharp borders of murmurations, and the way certain birds linger at the edges, can be explained by the mathematical rules that govern how individuals ...