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Tag: "pollinators" at biology news

Molecular biology fills gaps in knowledge of bat evolution

...ringer. Bats play a major ecological role as plant pollinators and insect predators. For Springer, this latest research is significant because it shows that molecular information can contribute to resolving and illuminating long-standing problems in evolutionary biology. The current findings lay the groundwork...

Amino acids in nectar enhance butterfly fecundity: A long awaited link

...fascinating interactions between flowers and their pollinators have resulted in a spectacular diversity of plants. In order to entice pollinators such as bees, flies or butterflies to visit and successfully pollinate their flowers, plants have ev...

The evolutionary triumph of flower power

... originally came on the scene to attract potential pollinators like bugs and birds, it is their appeal to humans ...wers have been so selected by humans that nature's pollinators ?the bugs and birds ?no longer find them attractive. So the job of propagating the species depends m...

Study: Competition for sex is a 'jungle out there'

...rom other individuals of the same species, causing pollinators to have to fly long distances to deliver pollen. When pollinators do arrive, they may deliver lots of unusable pollen from other plant species. Knight and her collea...

Sociality of sweat bees evolved simultaneously during climate change

...cluded. Halictid bees, which are important native pollinators in the Northern Hemisphere, where there are about 1,000 species, are nicknamed sweat bees because they are attracted to the salts in human perspiration. ...

Wild bees and the flowers they pollinate are disappearing together

...be too worrying, so long as other surviving insect pollinators are similar, and capable of pollinating the same f...lost. Overall, a small number of common generalist pollinators are replacing a larger number of rarer specialist species. Stuart Roberts from the University of...

Bumble bees can estimate time intervals

... the ability to estimate elapsed durations. Insect pollinators feed on floral nectar that depletes and renews with the passage of time, and insect communication and navigation may also require the ability to estimate the duration of time intervals. In the new work, the researchers investigated bumble bees' ab...

Researchers find that bumblebees' flower choice matters

...d if that's the case, purple loosestrife is luring pollinators away from the native plants. To investigate her hunch further, Flanagan added a third wetland species to the garden ?a native plant known as "great blue lobelia." So far, the bees continue their strong attraction to purple loosestrife. "This pre...

The subtleties of tropical forest demise

... or plants stop reproducing because their critical pollinators have vanished," said Laurance. The 23 chapters in the book span much of the tropical world, including South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Oceania. In addition to documenting a range of new and growing dangers to tropical f...

How did bilaterally symmetric flowers evolve from radially symmetric ones?

...laterally symmetrical flowers were more visited by pollinators and had higher fitness, measured by both the number of seeds produced per plant and the number of seeds surviving to the juvenile stage, than plants with radially symmetric flowers. "This study reveals that natural selection can play a key role in...

Bumblebee house warming -- it takes a village

...r and temperate climates, bumblebees are important pollinators of a number of food crops including blueberries, c...heir ecological success and to their importance as pollinators in cooler habitats." ...

Columbine flowers develop long nectar spurs in response to pollinators

... allows flowers to match the tongue lengths of the pollinators that drink their nectar, biologists have found. T...n Darwin's race, plants with the longest spurs and pollinators with the longest tongues [to tap the flowers' nectar] would be favored by natural selection, and--in...

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