Gavin Ballantyne

• BSc (Hons), PhD
• Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University

Interaction networks are widely used as tools to understand plant–pollinator communities, and to examine potential threats to plant diversity and food security if the ecosystem service provided by pollinating animals declines. However, most networks to date are based on recording visits to flowers, rather than recording clearly defined effective po...

1. Bee behaviour when visiting flowers is mediated by diverse chemical cues and signals, from the flower itself and from previous visitors to the flower. Flowers recently visited by bees and hoverflies may be rejected for a period of time by subsequent bee visitors. 2. Nectar-thieving ants also commonly visit flowers and could potentially influence...

The relative importance of specialized and generalized plant‐pollinator relationships is contentious, yet analyses usually avoid direct measures of pollinator quality (effectiveness), citing difficulties in collecting such data in the field and so relying on visitation data alone. We demonstrate that single‐visit deposition ( SVD ) of pollen on vir...

As flower visitors, ants rarely benefit a plant. They are poor pollinators, and can also disrupt pollination by deterring other flower visitors, or by stealing nectar. Some plant species therefore possess floral ant-repelling traits. But why do particular species have such traits when others do not? In a dry forest in Costa Rica, of 49 plant specie...

Most animal pollination results from plant–insect interactions, but how we perceive these interactions may differ with the sampling method adopted. The two most common methods are observations of visits by pollinators to plants and observations of pollen loads carried by insects. Each method could favour the detection of different species and inter...

Insects provide key pollination services in most terrestrial biomes, but this service depends on a multistep interaction between insect and plant. An insect needs to visit a flower, receive pollen from the anthers, move to another conspecific flower, and finally deposit the pollen on a receptive stigma. Each of these steps may be affected by climat...

During the main COVID-19 global pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18° North in Norwa...

We are currently seeing an expansion of pollinator-dependent crops in many parts of the world, but also growing evidence for pollinator population declines and loss of pollinator habitat. Climate change and population growth will place additional demands on crop production, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite the wealth of evidence that...

We are currently seeing an expansion of pollinator-dependent crops in many parts of the world, but also growing evidence for pollinator population declines and loss of pollinator habitat. Climate change and population growth will place additional demands on crop production, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite the wealth of evidence that...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

This paper forms part of a series of papers, seven in total, which have been requested by colleagues to help them as clinicians understand sustainability as it relates to dentistry. This paper focuses on biodiversity and how the dental team can become more sustainable. It is hoped that these series of papers stimulate interest, debate and discussio...

Estimating the pollen-deposition effectiveness of flower visitors is fundamental to understanding their performance as pollinators. While estimates of visitation rates, pollen loads, and single visit deposition (SVD) are all useful proxies for performance, and so help to reveal the relative effectiveness of different visitors, none take into accoun...

Accurate predictions of pollination service delivery require a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between plants and flower visitors. To improve measurements of pollinator performance underlying such predictions, we surveyed visitation frequency, pollinator effectiveness (pollen deposition ability) and pollinator importance (the produc...

Using our accumulated datasets from Kenyan savanna, Mediterranean garigue, UK gardens and heathland, involving 76 plants from 30 families, we present detailed data to quantify the superiority of bees as pollinators of most flowering plants when compared with other flower visitors. Bees provided the majority of visits to study species at all sites,...

Plant species tested against Camponotus novograndensis in tactile trials. K-W tests were for differences between agitated responses in ants from fresh flowers and other floral part used (older, pollen and nectar depleted flowers in most cases) with significant differences shown in bold. Mode of pollinations was determined from visits observed while...

There is growing awareness of the importance of cooperative behaviours in microbial communities. Empirical support for this insight comes from experiments using mutant strains, termed 'cheats', which exploit the cooperative behaviour of wild-type strains. However, little detailed work has gone into characterising the competitive dynamics of coopera...

Sex allocation theory has proved extremely successful at predicting when individuals should adjust the sex of their offspring in response to environmental conditions. However, we know rather little about the underlying genetics of sex ratio or how genetic architecture might constrain adaptive sex-ratio behavior. We examined how mutation influenced...

Conflict between males and females over reproduction influences the evolution of numerous aspects of reproductive behaviour, including how frequently individuals mate. Typically, females optimize the ben- efits of mating with a limited number of copulations, whereas males may benefit from increasing the num- ber of copulations, leading to a sexual...