Format: ORAL

Sukhraj Kaur, Vinita Gowda

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, India

Floral traits are recognised to play a key role in attracting pollinators, and the competition for limited pollinator resources can negatively impact a plants reproductive fitness, especially in communities with synchronous flowering. Consequently, plants have evolved strategies to minimize heterospecific pollen transfer (HPT) and ensure efficient pollination. While floral trait diversity has been well-studied for its role in generating specialized interactions, the role of pollinators in maintaining this diversity is often overlooked. We investigated the foraging behavior of native pollinators in highly diverse, annually flowering, herbaceous communities of the Sky-islands of northern Western Ghats. We assessed floral abundance using a transect method across the flowering season to understand: i) the extent of flowering synchrony with respect to floral color and shape, and ii) shifts in plant-pollinator interactions as flowering phenology changed. Additionally, we examined the degree of floral constancy displayed by the most dominant pollinator groupbeesto assess the effect of floral traits and their abundance within a patch in a heterogeneous community. Despite the high species diversity in these seasonal communities, we found that the community as a whole exhibits higher asynchrony in its flowering phenology, potentially reducing competition for shared pollinators. Interestingly, while generalized interactions dominate at the landscape-level, our study revealed that pollinators display high floral constancy towards the most abundant species within a patch. This observation was further supported by the dominance of uni-floral pollen in their loads, highlighting the critical role of individual foragers in preventing HPT and maintaining floral diversity. Our findings unveil the paradox between floral specialization and generalised interactions by showing the presence of low HPT and specialized response of individual pollinators to locally abundant species in a hyper-diverse community with generalised networks.