title: Floral advertisement and the competition for pollination services.
abstract: Flowering plants are a major component of terrestrial ecosystems, and most of them depend on animal pollinators for reproduction. Thus, the mutualism between flowering plants and their pollinators is a keystone ecological relationship in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Though plant-pollinator interactions have received considerable amount of attention, there are still many unanswered questions. In this paper, we use methods of evolutionary game theory to investigate the co-evolution of floral advertisement and pollinator preferences Our results indicate that competition for pollination services among plant species can in some cases lead to specialization of the pollinator population to a single plant species (oligolecty). However, collecting pollen from multiple plants - at least at the population level - is evolutionarily stable under a wider parameter range. Finally, we show that, in the presence of pollinators, plants that optimize their investment in attracting vs. rewarding visiting pollinators outcompete plants that do not.
authors: Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
authors: Michael A
authors: MA
authors: Fishman
authors: Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. Electronic address: lhadany@post.tau.ac.il.
authors: Lilach
authors: L
authors: Hadany
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D003163:Competitive Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D035264:Flowers / Q000502:physiology; D005716:Game Theory; D019684:Magnoliopsida / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D054817:Pollination / Q000502:physiology*; D012201:Reward
keywords: Allocation of resources; Floral advertisement; Nonlinear asymmetric evolutionary games; Plant–pollinator coevolution; Reproductive assurance; Reward