Pollination hummingbird

The shaman Celso Fiallo in Quito, Ecuador called me "pollita," "my little moth" because he believed that on the day I came to stay, his datura plants blossomed. He was referring to the datura-pollinating hummingbird moths recognized by the human skulls traced on the back of their tiny heads. From this omen I believed that the datura might be an important teacher for me. 

Figure 22.1 Examples from two conceptual axes of interactions between flowers and their animal visitors. Axis 1 is a specialization-generalization spectrum of plant-pollinator interactions. Panel A depicts a guild of red Chilean flowers that share one species of hummingbird as a pollinator. In Panel D, a Perideridia umbel is visited by several families of bees, wasps and flies most are effective pollinators. Axis 2 describes relationships in which animals visit flowers for their own reproductive purposes. In panel B, a female Tegiticula moth gathers pollen from anthers of Yucca filamentosa, for which it is both obligate pollinator and seed predator. In panel C, a Drosophila fly (black arrow) is lured by appearance and smell of decaying matter to a deceptive Aristolochia flower, seen in cross-section. Floral scent plays diverse roles along these axes, including pollinator attraction in food- and sex-based mimicry. All photographs were taken by the author.

Feinsinger P. K., Murray K. G., Kinsman S. and Busby W. H. (1986) Floral neighborhood and pollination success in four hummingbird-pollinated cloud forest plant species. Ecology 67, 449 -64. 

Nearly 200000 animal species play roles in poflinating the 250 000 species of wild flowering plants on our planet [12]. Among them, about 1500 species of vertebrates such as birds (e.g. hummingbirds) and mammals (e.g. bats, lemurs) serve as pollinators [12]. However, the main pollinators are insects they include bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, beetles and so on. Bees are the most efficient and the only dependable pollinators, because they visit flowers methodically to collect nectar and pollen and do not destroy the flower or the plant in the process. 

The animals that carried out the pollen transfer of anthers to the stigma flowers are known pollinators, and can be insects like bees, bettles, flies, butterflies, wasps and moth birds -hummingbirds and parakeets and small mammals - bats, rodents, and marsupials (Malagodi-Braga, 2005). Among pollinators, animals of Insecta class are the most important, and in the order Hymenoptera you can find the major number of them. Honeybees are the most important pollinators available in the nature. 

For many centuries, Central America provided the only source of vanilla, because In other places the plant s natural pollinator, the mellpona bees and hummingbirds, are not Indigenous. From 1841 onwards, however, artificial pollination was developed, so that vanilla could also be cultivated In Africa and the West Indies. 

In general, pollinators visit one or a limited number of species at one time. Such fidelity is guaranteed by the plant s morphology, odor, and color. Olfactory cues will be discussed later under terpenes (Chapter 19). Many plants are pollinated only by one vector and are characteristically known as bee flowers or butterfly flowers or hummingbird flowers. This mutual coadaptation has many benefits for both the plant and the animal. 

Delphinidin (2) and its derivatives are found frequently in bee-pollinated plants and are typical of families such as the Boraginaceae, Hydrophyllaceae, Polemoniaceae, and Scrophulariaceae. Sometimes the color of flowers of a species apparently varies in response to the type of pollinator present. As an example, one species of Penstemon, a blue, carpenter bee-pollinated species, hybridizes naturally with a red, hummingbird-pollinated species to produce a purple-flowered hybrid. Although normally this hybrid would fall outside the limits that the pollinators of the parental species would pollinate, this purple flowered hybrid is, fortuitously, pollinated by a wasp (Harbome, 1988c). 

W. S. and Thomson, J. D. (2007). Constrained lability in floral evolution Counting convergent origins of hummingbird pollination in Penstemon and Keckiella. New Phytologist, 176, 883-890. 

A wild tobacco plant from the Mojave Desert in the United States Nicotiana attenuata) uses very low doses of nicotine in its nectar. The plant uses sweet-smelling benzylacetone to attract insect pollinators, but the bitter taste of the very small amounts of nicotine deters visitors such as hawkmoths and hummingbirds from taking too much nectar. 

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