Flower color preferences of insects and livestock: effects on Gentiana lutea reproductive success
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Plant Science
- Keywords
- flower color variation, Gentiana lutea, insect herbivory, large mammal herbivory, herbivore preferences
- Copyright
- © 2016 Sobral et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Flower color preferences of insects and livestock: effects on Gentiana lutea reproductive success. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1636v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1636v1
Abstract
Angiosperms diversification was primarily driven by pollinator agents, but non-pollinator agents also promoted floral evolution. Gentiana lutea shows pollinator driven flower color variation in NW Spain. We test whether insect herbivores and livestock, which frequently feed in G.lutea, play a role in G. lutea flower color variation, by answering the following questions: i) Do insect herbivores and grazing livestock show flower color preferences when feeding on G. lutea? ii) Do mutualists (pollinators) and antagonists (seed predators, insect herbivores and livestock) jointly affect G. lutea reproductive success? Insect herbivores fed more often on yellow flowering individuals but they did not affect seed production whereas livestock affected seed production but did not show clear color preferences. Our data indicate that flower color variation of G. lutea is not affected by insect herbivores or grazing livestock.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.