Disrupting hurricanes
Researchers long thought that plants pollinated by specialised pollinators risk an evolutionary dead end. Now a group of international researchers show in New Pythologist that this does not have to be the case.
The Caribbean island Dominica contains an exception on the rule that plants located on islands don’t have specialised pollinators. Two Heliconia species, that are mostly visited by the purple-throated carib hummingbird. The flowers of those Heliconia species are formed in such a way that lots of pollen stick to the bill of those birds.
But species that are very interdependent on each other, like plants and their specialised pollinators, risk extinction when one of them disappears. This is actually a great risk for hurricane plagued islands. Especially the stronger ones can cause a lot of damage.
Other visiting birds also pollinated of the Heliconia plants
Like hurricane Maria that hit Dominica in 2017. This hurricane caused the death of lots of purple-throated carib hummingbirds, 75% of the population was lost. The researchers therefore decided to study the effect of this on the Heliconia plants.
Before the hurricane Heliconia plants were mostly visited by purple-throated caribs. But after the hurricane that changed. Now beside purple-throated caribs other birds also visited the plants. Other hummingbirds, but one species that was a frequent visitor was the bananaquit. And although more pollen sticked to the bill of the purple-throated caribs, other visiting birds also contributed to the pollination of the Heliconia plants.
Earlier studies that show that the purple-throated carib is the main pollinator of Heliconia plants dated from about 20 years after the last big destroying hurricane. Suggesting that as long as there is enough recovering time, the purple-throated carib can again become the main pollinator of the Heliconia plants. But then there should be no visiting hurricanes.
Literature
Schrøder, T.S.O., Gonçalves, F., Vollstädt, M.G.R., Zhang, T., Jensen, R.D., Tarazona-Tubens, F.L., Kim, S., Galetti, M., Simmons, B.I., Kaiser-Bunbury, C.N., Temeles, E.J. and Dalsgaard, B. (2024), Hurricane-induced pollinator shifts in a tightly coadapted plant–hummingbird mutualism. New Phytol. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19938
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