When we arrived in Monteverde, it was
cloudy and cold. Walking through the grassy field as we approached the San
Gerardo field station, my boots sunk into the mud and wet grass, and it seemed
as if everything was damp. In my head, I wouldn’t imagine Monteverde as a good
place to study pollination and flowering, but our schedule said otherwise.
During our lecture on pollinators and pollination strategies, we learned that
depending on the pollinator, plants tend to have certain floral characteristics
catered toward that organism. For example, red and purple flowers were often
more targeted towards plants wanting birds to pollinate them, whereas green and
white flowers were more targeted at bat pollinators. Variations in smell and
nectar types were other characteristics that plants altered in order to attract
a certain pollinator over another. After our lecture, our professor Mau sent us
into the forest with the goal to collect flowers. After about an hour of
collection, we all returned to the station and began to try to separate and
sort the flowers we had collected by who we thought the pollinator was.
The concept that seemed very simple in
lecture seemed much more complex as I looked at the variety of flower colors,
shapes, sizes and smells. Even within one color or one pollinator, there was a
huge variety of flowers. After we had finished sorting, I looked at the flowers
pollinated by bees, a system called “melittophily”. Flower colors ranged from
purple to pink to white to yellow, and varied in size from the size of a pencil
eraser to roughly the length of my hand, if not bigger. Some were very typical
looking flowers, with nice landing platforms for bees and large overlapping
petal, but others were tall bracts with hundreds of miniscule flowers contained
within. The categories that seemed clearly defined before were less so once I
actually looked at the different groups of flowers and noticed how fine the
differences could be.
Another thing that really intrigued me
about the flowers was how specialized and complex the relationship was between
pollinators and a plant species. One of our readings discussed the concept of
“floral fidelity” where a single pollinator specializes on a particular plant
species. While this relationship may not be long lasting or permanent in all
cases, it seems to me that these specializations could be part of why flowers
are so diverse, even within a single category of pollinators, as well as across
pollinators types. Despite how interesting the concept of floral fidelity is to
me, the paper had grim findings in relation to pollinators. When a single
species of pollinator was removed, floral fidelity of pollinators declined, in
turn lowering plant reproductive success in the plant species studied, as
pollinators failed to transfer pollen between the correct species. If the
removal of only a single pollinator could cause this, imagining what could
happen if we lose a few or even many pollinators is disheartening. Pollinators are important in preserving our
forests and environments as well our variety of fruits and vegetables, yet I
feel like I see more and more reports about bee declines (only one of many
groups of pollinators) extremely frequently, and little being done to try to
change this.
Going to college in California, where some
of the worst bee declines are occurring, brings this issue full circle for me.
At Occidental College, we have tried to work against this by starting
pollinator gardens, around campus, introducing feeders for some species (which
comes with another set of issues) and trying to plant native plants across
campus in general, rather than non natives or ornamentals. But its hard to know
if this is effective, especially since Occidental is a small area within a
large city- Los Angeles, and I feel like many strategies only focus on bees as
pollinators, despite the variety of organisms that serve as pollinators-
including butterflies, hummingbirds, flies and moths. Pollinator conservation
doesn’t have to be difficult I don’t think, simply planting pollinator gardens and
using fewer pesticides (if they are necessary at all, I would imagine none is
even better) can make a positive impact, and since many of our fruits and
vegetables (and forests) depend on it, I hope in the coming years to see a rise
in efforts to conserve pollinators as well as personally help those efforts in
my own life.
Natalie Myers
Occidental College
