DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Pollinator behavior and the maintenance of females in gynodioecious populations

University Of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Fairbanks AK

Investigators

Abstract

Pollination is one of the best studied and ecologically most important mutualisms in biology. Pollinators are diverse and vary widely in their behavior and efficiency in pollinating flowers. Many plants have separate sexes, yet it is poorly understood how changes in the pollinator community could differentially affect male, hermaphrodite, and female flowers. Pollinators that eat pollen, for example, may neglect female flowers. Furthermore, the distribution and abundance of pollinators vary over time naturally and as a result of human activity. Using computer simulations and field experiments, this study will directly measure the consequences of pollinator communities on seed production of female and hermaphrodite Silene vulgaris plants exposed to different groups of pollinators, including pollen collecting bees, nectar collecting moths, and seed eating insects, in North America and in Europe. The intellectual merit of this research is that it will develop our understanding of the consequences of changes in pollinator communities on plant fitness, and our understanding of the conditions that favor plants that are hermaphroditic or which have separate sexes. This study will have broader impacts in several areas. There are potential economic implications because many agricultural crops require insect pollination to produce adequate yields. Computer programs created for this project will also be used to develop freely available educational software modeling pollination processes for use in university biology classes. Finally, this project will develop a graduate student as a scientist and further expand an international collaboration between US and Czech Republic researchers.