Projects per year
Abstract
Understanding the origins of flower colour signalling to pollinators is fundamental to evolutionary biology and ecology. Flower colour evolves under pressure from visual systems of pollinators, like birds and insects, to establish global signatures among flowers with similar pollinators. However, an understanding of the ancient origins of this relationship remains elusive. Here, we employ computer simulations to generate artificial flower backgrounds assembled from real material sample spectra of rocks, leaves and dead plant materials, against which to test flowers' visibility to birds and bees. Our results indicate how flower colours differ from their backgrounds in strength, and the distributions of salient reflectance features when perceived by these key pollinators, to reveal the possible origins of their colours. Since Hymenopteran visual perception evolved before flowers, the terrestrial chromatic context for its evolution to facilitate flight and orientation consisted of rocks, leaves, sticks and bark. Flowers exploited these pre-evolved visual capacities of their visitors, in response evolving chromatic features to signal to bees, and differently to birds, against a backdrop of other natural materials. Consequently, it appears that today's flower colours may be an evolutionary response to the vision of diurnal pollinators navigating their world millennia prior to the first flowers.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 20232018 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
Volume | 290 |
Issue number | 2013 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 20 Dec 2023 |
Keywords
- chromatic signal
- floral colour
- insect pollination
- spectral reflectance data
- vision
Projects
- 2 Finished
-
A World Without Bees: simulating important agricultural insect pollinators
Dorin, A. & Dyer, A.
Australian Research Council (ARC), Monash University, RMIT University
1/01/16 → 11/04/21
Project: Research
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Pollination in a new climate: Evolutionary simulation of bee and flower interactions for predicting impacts of climate change on pollination.
Dorin, A., Dyer, A. G. & Chittka, L.
Australian Research Council (ARC)
28/02/13 → 15/12/16
Project: Research