A study that some colleagues and I published in 2019 is currently listed in the top 100 Ecology papers published by Scientific Reports that year (ranked 54th out of 550 ones based on download rates). This rank is quite remarkable and the idea of this study came from a visit to an acquaintance. It was 2014 when on a trip to UK for attending a conference, Jan (my PhD supervisor that time) and I stopped at Jeff Ollerton’s lab in Northampton for a hello. We chatted about my PhD degree about to start in Czech Republic and set a meeting for a brainstorming. This event provided us an exciting working hypothesis about plants and pollinator interactions. Once back to Czech Republic, we decided to test how the pollinator guild would react to the sudden loss of the most favored plant species. We choose to test this with field manipulations, rather than by computer simulations. In particular, we planned to remove 4 plant species from natural communities, one plant species at a time, based on the amount of pollinators they previously received. We discovered a few but important aspects of how a pollinator guild depends on the scenario set by the plant assemblage. We found that knocking out the most visited plants caused sudden decreases of pollinator abundances. On top of that, we discovered that those pollinators who did not disappear after plant removal, redirected the visitation towards particular flowers instead of redistributing equally to the remaining plants. Specifically, our data suggested that flowers that were smaller than or with more sugar in the nectar than the removed flowers received more visitors.
These findings supported the idea that generalist flowers (i.e. higly visited) play a key role in sustaining local pollinator abundances, and that pollinator can somehow find alternative resources but according to specific flower features. It was an exciting study, which helped understanding how pollinators redirect their foraging choices after perturbations and that could also bear some implications even for ecosystem conservation. For a full view, the study is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43553-4.
We did also explore what impacts this removal caused on the structures of plant-pollinator interaction networks, but I will not reveal too much about that now (but see here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.28.923177v1)
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