Hairiness: the missing link between pollinators and pollination
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
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Abstract
Functional traits are the primary biotic component driving organism influence on ecosystem functions; in consequence, traits are widely used in ecological research. However, most animal trait-based studies use easy-to-measure characteristics of species that are at best only weakly associated with functions. Animal-mediated pollination is a key ecosystem function and is likely to be influenced by pollinator traits, but to date no one has identified functional traits that are simple to measure and have good predictive power. Here, we show that a simple, easy to measure trait (hairiness) can predict pollinator effectiveness with high accuracy. We used a novel image analysis method to calculate entropy values for insect body surfaces as a measure of hairiness. We evaluated the power of our method for predicting pollinator effectiveness by regressing pollinator hairiness (entropy) against single visit pollen deposition (SVD) and pollen loads on insects. We used linear models and AICC model selection to determine which body regions were the best predictors of SVD and pollen load. We found that hairiness can be used as a robust proxy of SVD. The best models for predicting SVD for the flower species Brassica rapa and Actinidia deliciosa were hairiness on the face and thorax as predictors (R2 = 0.98 and 0.91 respectively). The best model for predicting pollen load for B. rapa was hairiness on the face (R2 = 0.81). Accordingly, we suggest that the match between pollinator body region hairiness and plant reproductive structure morphology is a powerful predictor of pollinator effectiveness. We show that pollinator hairiness is strongly linked to pollination – an important ecosystem function, and provide a rigorous and time-efficient method for measuring hairiness. Identifying and accurately measuring key traits that drive ecosystem processes is critical as global change increasingly alters ecological communities, and subsequently, ecosystem functions worldwide.
Cite this as
2016. Hairiness: the missing link between pollinators and pollination. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2433v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2433v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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Supplemental Information
Testing hairiness as a predicitor of SVD for a different flower type
Variation in entropy values between different photos of the same specimen
Relationships between mean entropy for each body region and mean single visit pollen deposition on Actinidia deliciosa
Relationships between mean entropy for each body region and mean single visit pollen deposition (SVD) on Actinidia deliciosa for 7 different insect pollinator species. Black lines are regressions for simple linear models.
Intraspecific variation in pollinator hairiness
Intraspecific variation in entropy values across different body regions of insect pollinators used in our study. Boxes represent the interquartile range, horizontal lines within boxes are median values, whiskers are the range and single dots are outliers.
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Jamie R Stavert conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Gustavo Liñán-Cembrano conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Jacqueline R Beggs conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Brad G Howlett conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
David E Pattemore conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments.
Ignasi Bartomeus conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The raw data has been supplied as a supplementary file.
Funding
This research was supported by the University of Auckland and MBIE C11X1309 Bee Minus to Bee Plus and Beyond: Higher Yields From Smarter, Growth-focused Pollination Systems. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.