Poster

         Tropical Biology

Heterospecific pollen transfer effect on pollination success in a tropical biodiverse community

Presenting Author
Nathalia Susin Streher
Description
Most plants depend on adequate quantity and quality of pollen delivery by pollinators for successful reproduction. Suboptimal reproductive output can be attributed to pre-pollination processes (e.g. few coflowering mates and low floral visitation) and post-pollination processes that occur from interacting communities of conspecific pollen (CP) and heterospecific pollen (HP) grains on stigmas. Even though HP deposition is widespread in nature we still have sparse evidence of its effects on community reproduction limiting our understanding of how pollinator-mediated interactions influence community assembly. Moreover, HP effects can vary widely in sign and strength calling for approaches involving multiple species interactions. We investigated the pollen load composition naturally deposited on stigmas of 30 plant species in a biodiverse tropical community with high levels of pollinator sharing. We tested whether HP affects recipient pollination success (i.e. CP tubes/pollen grain) and whether this effect increases with HP diversity. We identified that even in the absence of HP, conspecific pollination success is halved indicating pollen tube germination limitation by CP quality. The presence of a single heterospecific donor species in the stigma pollen load diminished even more recipient pollination success and this effect was accentuated when two or more HP donor species were involved. Therefore, heterospecific pollen transfer limits the studied plant community reproduction contributing to the understanding of pollen transfer consequences in biodiverse ecosystems.