title: The colorful language of Australian flowers.
abstract: The enormous increase in phylogenetic information in recent years has allowed many old questions to be reexamined from a macroevolutionary perspective. We have recently considered evolutionary convergence in floral colors within pollination syndromes, using bird-pollinated species in Australia. We combined quantitative measurements of floral reflectance spectra, models of avian color vision, and a phylogenetic tree of 234 Australian species to show that bird-pollinated flowers as a group do not have colors that are significantly different from the colors of insect-pollinated flowers. However, about half the bird-pollinated flowers have convergently evolved a narrow range of colors with dominant long-wavelength reflection far more often than would be expected by chance. These convergent colors would be seen as distinctly different from other floral colors in our sample when viewed by honeyeaters (family Meliphagidae), birds with a phylogenetically ancestral type of color vision and the dominant avian pollinators in Australia. Our analysis shows how qualitative ideas in natural history, like the concept of pollination syndromes, can be given more precise definition and rigorous statistical testing that takes into account phylogenetic information.
authors.affiliation: National Evolutionary Synthesis Center; Durham, NC USA ; School of Biological Sciences; Monash University; Melbourne, VIC Australia.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Burd
authors.affiliation: National Evolutionary Synthesis Center; Durham, NC USA ; Department of Biology; Bucknell University; Lewisburg, PA USA.
authors.forename: C Tristan
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Stayton
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Information Technology; Monash University; Melbourne, VIC Australia.
authors.forename: Mani
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shrestha
authors.affiliation: School of Media and Communication; RMIT University; Melbourne, VIC Australia ; Department of Physiology; Monash University; Melbourne, VIC Australia.
authors.forename: Adrian G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Dyer
keywords: bird pollination; convergent evolution; floral color; pollination syndrome; reflectance spectra