Format: ORAL

Sissi Lozada-Gobilard1,2, ystein H. Opedal1

1 Biodiversity Unit, Department of Biology Lund University, Sweden 2 Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia

Flower traits have been shown to be related to breeding systems (outcrossing vs. selfing), pollinators and can vary along environmental gradients. Environmental variation along altitudinal gradients is commonly associated with changes in the diversity of plants and animals, making them ideal systems to study variation in flower traits and its relationship with pollinators. We measured flower traits of 20 plant species and observed their pollinators (flower visitors that touched reproductive parts of the flower) along an altitudinal gradient (1000-4500m) in the tropical Andes of Bolivia. Flower traits included flower size, entrance diameter, flower length and anther-stigma distance. In particular, we compared allometries of stigma-anther height and flower size traits along the gradient. In this study we test the hypothesis that anther-stigma correlations is stronger at higher altitudes, assuming that at higher altitudes the conditions are harder, pollination is less reliable and therefore selfing plants species would be more common. We tested whether allometric slopes for fit traits (anther-stigma height) differ from those for flower size traits and among pollination systems. We expect to find a shallower allometric slope for fit traits than size traits. Additionally, we tested whether anther-stigma height correlations are related to more generalist plant species or a particular guild of pollinators.