Format: ORAL

Thais Vasconcelos1, Lena Heinrich1, Aline Martins1

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

Floral phenotypes, as any other plant trait, may present geographical structuring based on biotic and abiotic conditions that favor certain traits to occur more often in sympatry due to convergence. Recently, it has been suggested that angiosperms and their main pollinators, the bees, may present a spatial mismatch in their patterns of diversity, with areas where bee species richness peak being areas where angiosperm species richness is relatively low and vice versa. We here explore how this spatial mismatch may impact the geographical distribution of floral phenotypes of bee pollinated plant lineages. First, we describe the spatial mismatch and explore whether this pattern leads to a decrease in the proportion of bee pollinated angiosperms in areas where bees are less diverse. Second, we investigate how local floral phenotype diversity in bee pollinated plants may be impacted by a less diverse, but not necessarily less abundant, pollinator community, specifically testing whether floral phenotypes would tend to be more morphologically uniform through time in these lineages. We discuss the results in the context of coevolution between bees and angiosperms and how this relationship has modulated the convergent and divergent evolution of floral traits across time and space.