Florian Etl

University of Vienna | UniWien · Department of Structural and Functional Botany

Angiosperm flowers and their animal visitors have co-evolved for at least 140 Ma, and early flowers were likely used mainly as mating and feeding sites by several groups of insects, including beetles, flies, true bugs, and thrips. Earlier studies suggested that shifts from such neutral or antagonistic relationships toward mutualistic pollination in...

Flowering plants often use chemical signals to attract their pollinators, and compounds that elicit attraction are known for several groups of pollinators. For other pollinators such as gall midges, however, compounds responsible for their attraction to flowers are largely unknown. Here, we describe the pollination biology of Anthurium acutangulum...

The genome size of an organism is an important trait that has predictive values applicable to various scientific fields, including ecology. The main source of plant C-values is the Plant DNA C-values database of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, which currently contains 12,273 estimates. However, it covers only 2.9% of known angiosperm species and has...

Male euglossine bees exhibit unique adaptations for the acquisition and accumulation of chemical compounds from “perfume flowers” and other sources. During courtship display, male bees expose perfume mixtures, presumably to convey species-specific recognition and/or mate choice signals to females. Because olfaction regulates both signal production...

The uncommon jasmone derivatives dehydrojasmone, isojasmol, and isojasmyl acetate, floral scent compounds from night-blooming Araceae, were synthesized in a scalable synthesis employing conjugate addition with a selenoacetal as the key step. The stereoselective strategy with subsequent enzymatic kinetic resolution allowed determining the absolute c...

Most representatives of the pantropical monocot family Marantaceae have highly specialized flowers either adapted to bee or bird pollinators. However, bee-pollinated species are often reported to also be visited by birds, which may then act as co-pollinators or extract nectar without pollinating the flowers. A variety of flower visitors including o...

Nocturnal flowering plants often release strong scents to attract their pollinators. Among night active flower visitors are cyclocephaline scarab beetles, which have been demonstrated to respond to uncommon volatile organic compounds released in high amounts by their host plants. In Araceae, the molecular structure of several such compounds is yet...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The description of subheadings of Figs. 4c and d have to be interchanged. Figure 4c shows the mass spectrum of (E)-4,8-dimethylnona-1,3,7-trien-5-yl acetate (4), while Fig. 4d shows the mass spectrum of (Z)-3-methylene- 2-(pent-2-en-1-yl)cyclopentyl acetate (3). The correct ver...

Chemical communication is ubiquitous. The identification of conserved structural elements in visual and acoustic communication is well established, but comparable information on chemical communication displays (CCDs) is lacking. We assessed the phenotypic integration of CCDs in a meta‐analysis to characterize patterns of covariation in CCDs and ide...

It has been known since Stefan Vogel’s observations in 1969 that solitary female oil bees collect fatty floral oils from specialized oil-secreting plants with the aid of hairy patches on either their legs or abdomen, a reward used as food for their larvae and/or to line their brood cells. Similar adaptations are also known from male oil bees, altho...

Inflorescences of Araceae pollinated by cyclocephaline scarab beetles are visited frequently by a wide array of other arthropods that exploit floral resources without taking part in pollination, including earwigs, flies, and true bugs. To date, nothing is known about the cues these insect visitors use to locate the inflorescences and whether or to...