Yet, dishonest plants persist in the population. How they are maintained despite strong bee preference for honesty remains a mystery!

🧬 Here, we show that the degree of plant honesty is partly heritable. Since bees favor honest plants, they can drive the evolution of honesty—leading to higher seed production in honest plants.

🌸 An honest plant exhibits a positive correlation between its signal and reward, allowing bees to learn this association and prefer honest plants over dishonest ones.

🐝 Bees searching for flowers cannot directly see how much nectar (i.e., reward) a flower contains. Instead, they rely on honest floral signals, such as flower size or scent.

News Release from @EurekAlert: www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Genetic variation in the honesty of plants to their pollinators Pollinators prefer flowers with traits that reliably indicate reward quality or quantity, a relationship defining ‘honest signals’. Despite its prevalence in plant–pollinator interactions, genetic v...

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Super excited about my latest paper published in one of my favorite journals @newphyt.bsky.social

🌸🐝 Plant honesty to their pollinators is partly heritable; bees prefer honest plants and these produce more seeds.

Then why are there dishonest genotypes? 🤔 that's the next question!

Link below

Four-part photo of Turnera velutina flowers showing manually stained anthers using different natural pigments (A) Micropipette with the natural pigment before staining the anthers, (B) Safranin, (C) Methylene blue, (D) Fast green. The use of different colors allowed distinguishing pollen movement within and between flowers. This procedure was applied to each experimental trial to estimate the efficiency of cross-pollination and how this depends or not on the phenotype of neighboring plants.

Effects of anther-stigma position on cross-#pollination efficiency in a # hermaphroditic plant

New #AJB research by Matias Baranzelli, Manuel Ochoa-Sánchez, Sergio Ramos, Fernanda Baena-Díaz, Paula Sosenski, Karina Boege, Cesar Domínguez & Juan Fornoni

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany

A Continuum From Positive to Negative Interactions Drives Plant Species' Performance in a Diverse Community We explored the patterns of species performance in a real-world community, dependent on pairwise and higher-order interactions with species belonging to the same and other trophic levels (plant, herb....

Yayy 🌱🪲🐝🐌- A list of stellar ecologists and myself showed that (1) species interactions can be summarised at the guild level, except for a few critical species, (2) they occur along a continuum from positive-to-negative, and (3) they have relatively weak strength except between plants!

Congrats! I'm so looking forward to reading this paper 🤩

Van Valen's Red Queen Hypothesis says that species within ecosystems must constantly change (as in Alice in Wonderland, my drawing) to remain in place. This classic paper was rejected multiple times, and the author created a new journal to publish it mn.uio.no/cees/english...

This is a great initiative. I wonder if it has anything to do with the plant-pollinator interaction networks collected by the collective efforts of lots of people during Covid times. As far as I recall, that was coordinated by @jeffollerton.bsky.social

EuPPollNet: A European Database of Plant‐Pollinator Networks Motivation Pollinators play a crucial role in maintaining Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. However, rapid human-induced environmental changes are compromising the long-term persistence of plant-pol...

[new paper] EuPPollNet: A European Database of Plant-Pollinator Networks
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Another wonderful paper of @joseblanuza.bsky.social making open more than >1500 networks and looking at their properties. Come for the data, stay for the cool figures!

Plasticity in plant mating systems Many plants are extremely plastic in their vegetative and life-history traits, allowing them to deal with a variety of environmental conditions during…

📄 Check out the full paper, free for 50 days! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We show that plant reproduction can be highly plastic at different stages of the process and spatiotemporal scales, affecting plant ecology and evolution, and that in crops 🌾 such plasticity can be beneficial or detrimental.

Together with Hanneke Suijkerbuijk and Erik H. Poelman, we have compiled the existing literature and reviewed this important and timely topic.

Although we know that plants 🌿 can be highly plastic and adjust to real-time changes in their environment, there has been no discussion about how plastic are plants in their reproduction.

Plant reproduction is therefore a crucial process that provides us with food and allows plants to continue to exist and adapt to their ever-changing environment.

A fruit is a fertilized ovary 🍎, seeds like almonds are fertilized ovules (and by the way, almonds need 100% pollination by bees).

Paper alert 📄🚨 Plasticity in Plant Mating Systems
@Trends in Plant Science

Most of the seeds, fruits and vegetables we enjoy are the result of plant reproduction 🌸 🌻 🐝.

Is there a similar effort for the evolution/evolutionary biologists community? thanks

Push–Pull Intercropping Increases the Antiherbivore Benzoxazinoid Glycoside Content in Maize Leaf Tissue Push–pull technology refers to a promising mixed cropping practice for sustainable agricultural intensification, which uses properties of intercrop and border crop species to defend a focal crop again...

New paper from our group! We found that maize plants from push-push fields had a higher relative abundance of metabolites toxic to insect herbivores. This suggests that maize plants growing with companion plants are "stronger" than maize plants growing alone.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Hello Science Bluesky! We just moved here from the other page and are looking forward to engaging with everyone here. We are the Spatial Genetics lab at the University of Zurich and work on plant ecological chemistry, genomics, remote sensing, biodiversity and much more! 🍂🌱🪴🌳🛩️🌍🛰️

2 open PhD positions about unravelling plant-insect communication for sustainable agroecosystems in Switzerland! informationecology.github.io/openpositions/