EEB Monday Seminar - 10/19/2009

Held every Monday at 4:00pm in Biological Sciences West Building, Room 301 (building location map)

Room: BSW 301

Speaker: Dr. Nick Waser

Title: The Ecology of Place, and New Perspectives in Pollination Biology

Abstract:

How can research at a single place contribute to general ecological understanding? At first this appears paradoxical, since each place is idiosyncratic, yet examples readily come to mind illustrating the value of ‘case studies’ in ecology. One such example involves the ubiquitous terrestrial mutualism between flowering plants and their animal pollinators, as studied at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Colorado. Over the past four decades, dozens of scientists have chosen the RMBL as a place to explore behavioral, ecological, physiological, and evolutionary aspects of pollination, thereby accumulating a heritage of understanding that is transferable to other places. When this accumulation began, the dominant view of pollination was typological. Field studies revealed, however, that pollinators often are flexible behaviorally, and that even complex flowers can attract diverse visitors; analysis of entire communities later showed that specialists usually associate with generalists, rather than (as the typologies assumed) with other specialists. Also called into question, at least in the case of vision, was the paradigm that floral phenotypes contain “private signals” aimed at specific pollinators. Various workers at the RMBL were able to demonstrate substantial narrow-sense heritability of floral traits, and pollinator-mediated selection on them, but the flexible nature of the mutualism suggested that pollinators may not drive plant speciation via the simplest ‘single variation’ mechanism in which they simultaneously effect floral divergence and reproductive isolation. Indeed, experiments with one system confirm that this mechanism for the macroevolutionary dynamics of the mutualism, however elegant, should be viewed with caution. These examples illustrate the value of place-based research for expanding our general understanding of important ecological interactions, and provides a précis of how our thinking about one such interaction has evolved.

Biography: