Format: ORAL

Vanessa G. Marcelo1,3*, Flvia M. D. Marquitti2, Mario Vallejo-Marn3, Vinicius L. G. Brito1

1 Programa de Pós Graduação em Ecologia, Conservação e Biodiversidade, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Uberlândia, Brazil; 2 Instituto de Física “Gleb Wataghin”, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil; 3 Department of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; *email- vanessa.marcelo@ebc.uu.se

The pathway to male reproductive success in plants is affected by events that potentially affect the chance of individual pollen grains reaching the stigma, such as grooming behavior by pollen vectors and the variation in the positioning of reproductive organs. To date, only a few theoretical investigations have attempted to model the effect of grooming on pollen transfer, and empirical studies have been limited to species in which pollen movement can be tracked. Thus, we use a spatially explicit agent-based modeling (ABMs) approach to determine the effect of pollen redistribution and removal in the pollen landscape on the vector body, affecting plant reproductive success and mating between floral individuals, associated with variation in reproductive organs. For this, we simulated pollen vector visits and their grooming behavior on a sequence of different flowers in a population. We showed that pollen redistribution and removal restructure the pollen landscape in the body of the bee, in a way that increases the pollen delivery in consecutive visits and the number of pollen donors deposited on the stigmas. We also observed that the mating networks were affected both by the grooming behavior and by the morphological variation of the reproductive organs. So, in the absence of grooming, together with the variation in the positioning of the stigma, makes populations more connected and generalist. The grooming behavior breaks the dominance of some individuals, making the relationships between individuals better distributed. Floral individuals visited by vectors without grooming and that have variation in stigma position are reproductively more generalists. Our model predicts that species pollinated by non-grooming vectors are more variable in stigma position than species pollinated by grooming vector. However, empirical studies will be needed to confirm the predictions we generate with our model, allowing greater knowledge of the factors that may affect pollen transfer.