How scent and nectar influence floral antagonists and mutualists
Abstract
Many plants attract and reward pollinators with floral scents and nectar, respectively, but these traits can also incur fitness costs as they also attract herbivores. This dilemma, common to most flowering plants, could be solved by not producing nectar and/or scent, thereby cheating pollinators. Both nectar and scent are highly variable in native populations of coyote tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata, with some producing no nectar at all, uncorrelated with the tobacco's main floral attractant, benzylacetone. By silencing benzylacetone biosynthesis and nectar production in all combinations by RNAi, we experimentally uncouple these floral rewards/attractrants and measure their costs/benefits in the plant's native habitat and experimental tents. Both scent and nectar increase outcrossing rates for three, separately-tested, pollinators and both traits increase oviposition by a hawkmoth herbivore, with nectar being more influential than scent. These results underscore that it makes little sense to study floral traits as if they only mediated pollination services.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Marcel Dicke, Wageningen University, Netherlands
Version history
- Received: March 21, 2015
- Accepted: June 30, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 1, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 11, 2015 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Kessler et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Further reading
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- Ecology
- Plant Biology
Floral scents and nectar attract both pollinators and other animals that may reduce the plant's fitness, and therefore put flowering plants in a challenging situation.
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- Ecology
The understanding of eco-evolutionary dynamics, and in particular the mechanism of coexistence of species, is still fragmentary and in need of test bench model systems. To this aim we developed a variant of SELEX in vitro selection to study the evolution of a population of ∼1015 single-strand DNA oligonucleotide ‘individuals’. We begin with a seed of random sequences which we select via affinity capture from ∼1012 DNA oligomers of fixed sequence (‘resources’) over which they compete. At each cycle (‘generation’), the ecosystem is replenished via PCR amplification of survivors. Massive parallel sequencing indicates that across generations the variety of sequences (‘species’) drastically decreases, while some of them become populous and dominate the ecosystem. The simplicity of our approach, in which survival is granted by hybridization, enables a quantitative investigation of fitness through a statistical analysis of binding energies. We find that the strength of individual resource binding dominates the selection in the first generations, while inter- and intra-individual interactions become important in later stages, in parallel with the emergence of prototypical forms of mutualism and parasitism.