RINVIATO - BtBs seminar - Tricks but no Treats – Making a Fool of Your Pollinator

RINVIATO

Jana Jersakova, Department of Ecosystem Biology, Faculty of Science at the University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic

Mimicry is a classic example of adaptation through natural selection. The traditional focus of mimicry research has been on predator–prey interactions, but there is now also rapidly-growing body of research on floral mimicry in plants. Floral mimicry encompasses a set of evolutionary strategies whereby plants imitate the food sources, oviposition sites, or mating partners of animals in order to exploit them as pollinators. Interestingly, orchid family contains unusually high occurrence of non-rewarding flowers compared to other plant families. Though deception in orchids has been intensively studied since Darwin, the evolution of non-rewarding flowers still presents a major puzzle for evolutionary biology. What are the possible explanations?

Host: Paolo Biella

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