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Color plate of the study system. (a) Tritonia laxifolia (Iridaceae) in flower at Fish River Pass, Pikoli. (b) Amegilla fallax approaches a flower, the white arrow highlights three-dimensional anther mimics on each lower tepal. (c) Bee visitor required to crawl onto and over the anther mimics to contact reproductive parts of the flower. (d) UV images of an unpainted control (left) and a flower with its anther mimics painted with UV-reflecting orange paint.
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Numerous studies have identified traits associated with anther mimicry, however, the processes underlying floral deception remains poorly documented for these structures. We studied the importance of pollinator attraction and mechanical fit of anther mimics in Tritonia laxifolia (Iridaceae) and their relative contributions to reproductive success....
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... coast of Africa, from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape of South Africa to Tanzania ( de Vos 1982). The scentless, zygomorphic flowers are orange red with the adaxial surface of the dorsal tepal being a contrasting pale pink. The most striking feature of the flowers is the three peculiar bright yellow anther mimics on each of the lower tepals (Fig. 2a,b). In addition, T. laxifolia has three inconspicuous, light pink-colored anthers. Receptive stigmas are deeply divided with three style branches becoming recurved and coarsely pustulate when receptive ( Manning et al. 2002). Flowers typically last between two and three days and are protandrous with distinct male and female phases ...
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... ferox. At both study sites, T. laxifolia is primarily visited by Amegilla fallax (Fig. 2b,c), with Apis mellifera scutellata and pollen-collecting bees present in lower abundance. Medium and large butterflies Colotis eris eris, Pinacopteryx eriphia eriphia, and Papilio demodocus were abundant and frequently visited the flowers (Fig. ...
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... ferox. At both study sites, T. laxifolia is primarily visited by Amegilla fallax (Fig. 2b,c), with Apis mellifera scutellata and pollen-collecting bees present in lower abundance. Medium and large butterflies Colotis eris eris, Pinacopteryx eriphia eriphia, and Papilio demodocus were abundant and frequently visited the flowers (Fig. ...
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... excised all three anther mimics from all available flowers from exactly half of the experimental inflorescences (n = 64) using a surgical blade. The other half remained unmanipulated (only the anthers were removed) (n = 64). We refer to these inflorescences/flowers as "anther mimics excised" and "unmanipulated controls" throughout the manuscript (Fig. S2d). Essentially, the excision of the anther mimic removes the physical structure, but the round yellow mark on the tepal that remains after excision serves as a twodimensional visual component of the anther mimic. Furthermore, physical damage that may influence bee behavior on flowers is accounted for by the removal of the anthers in both ...
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... butterflies made a significant contribution to fitness. If this was the case, we expect open treatments to experience a higher proportion of seed set than caged individuals. Wire cages had holes large enough to allow bees (A. fallax body length: distance from head to tip of abdomen, 11.07 ± 0.97 mm [n = 4]) to enter the cages (25 mm holes) (see Fig. S2e), but small enough to prevent white butterflies from entering (Authors, pers. obs.). The remaining 32 inflorescences were left uncaged, containing 28 manipulated and 17 unmanipulated flowers (45 treatments). After 3 weeks, we collected fruits and discerned fertilized from aborted ovules. Fertilized ovules were much larger, hard, and ...
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... 14 A. fallax bees showed a significant selection bias for flowers with anther mimics painted with yellow UV-absorbent paint over flowers painted with orange UV-reflecting paint (χ 2 = 11.00, df = 1, P < 0.001; Fig. 3a), the loci of UV-reflecting orange paint being close to the loci of the orange of adjacent flower tepals in bee color space (Figs. 2d, 4, S3, S4a). In contrast, 13 A. fallax bees made equal choices between anther mimics painted with yellow UV-absorbent paint over unpainted controls (χ 2 = 0.15; df = 1, P = 0.70; Fig. 3b), the loci of both these yellow colors clustering together in bee color space (Figs. 4, S4b). Chromatic contrasts reveal that anther mimics were above ...
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... branch and the top of the anther mimic on the median tepal is 3.45 ± 0.19 mm (n = 20), which is 1.28 mm less than the thorax height of the most abundant bee pollinator A. fallax 4.73 ± 0.07 mm (n = 12) (Methods S2). Importantly, less abundant butterflies fit poorly with flowers and the anther mimics. From observations and photographic evidence (Fig. S2B), the relatively long proboscides of the butterflies visiting the flowers result in the insects probing the flowers between the anther mimics with their heads remaining outside of the flower. As a consequence, butterflies had remarkably low pollen loads, and we did not find a single pollen grain from T. laxifolia on any of the wings or ...
Citations
... Based on the features that exist between entities, classification results can be obtained without a priori knowledge. Many sectors, including sociology, education, psychology, and economics, have adopted clustering approaches [22][23][24]. ...
Painting is a two-dimensional visual language that expresses ideas and emotions while also creating aesthetic aspects. Flower and bird painting embodies an aesthetic ideal. For Chinese people, it serves as a harmonious coexistence with natural objects. Based on the contemporary context and the concept of environmental aesthetics, flower and bird painting should go beyond the sensual portrayal of plants and animals, individualistic lyricism, and the tendency of commercialization. It helps to examine the important value of plants and animals in the spiritual life of human beings from the perspective of the community of human destiny. It also raises the concern of contemporary people for the natural environment and the survival status of natural objects. Free from one’s sorrow and happiness, the painting focuses on the pressing ecological issues of universal concern to all mankind and becomes art with world significance expressed in Chinese aesthetic symbols and artistic forms. It is important to classify the teaching resources of Chinese flower and bird painting theory and time. The traditional Chinese flower and bird painting theory and practice course teaching resources classification method are inefficient; for this reason, the adaptive clustering algorithm of teaching resources of Chinese flower and bird painting theory and practice is proposed. Using mutual information technology to obtain incremental data, the digital Chinese flower and bird painting theory and practice course teaching resources features are extracted. It features a tree to be constructed according to the two-step clustering algorithm. The leaf nodes of the feature tree are grouped according to the hierarchical coalescence algorithm. The Euclidean square distance is used to obtain the Chinese flower and bird painting theory and practice course teaching resources square root measure continuous variables. The number of clusters with the maximum growth distance represents the final number of clusters. The results show that the method can realize the effective grouping and classification of Chinese flower and bird painting theory and practice course teaching resources.
Floral colours represent a highly diverse communication signal mainly involved in flower visitors' attraction and guidance, but also flower discrimination, filtering non‐pollinators and discouraging floral antagonists. The divergent visual systems and colour preferences of flower visitors, as well as the necessity of cues for flower detection and discrimination, foster the diversity of floral colours and colour patterns. Despite the bewildering diversity of floral colour patterns, a recurrent component is a yellow UV‐absorbing floral centre, and it is still not clear why this pattern is so frequent in angiosperms. The pollen, anther, stamen, and androecium mimicry (PASAM) hypothesis suggests that the system composed of the flowers possessing such yellow UV‐absorbing floral reproductive structures, the flowers displaying central yellow UV‐absorbing structures as floral guides, and the pollen‐collecting, as well as pollen‐eating, flower visitors responding to such signals constitute the world's most speciose mimicry system. In this review, we call the attention of researchers to some hypothetical PASAM systems around the globe, presenting some fascinating examples that illustrate their huge diversity. We will also present new and published data on pollen‐eating and pollen‐collecting pollinators' responses to PASAM structures supporting the PASAM hypothesis and will discuss how widespread these systems are around the globe. Ultimately, our goal is to promote the idea that PASAM is a plausible first approach to understanding floral colour patterns in angiosperms.
