A bee's eye view of remarkable floral colour patterns in the south-west Australian biodiversity hotspot revealed by false colour photography

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Colour pattern is a key cue of bee attraction selectively driving the appeal of pollinators. It comprises the main colour of the flower with extra fine patterns, indicating a reward focal point such as nectar, nectaries, pollen, stamens and floral guides. Such advertising of floral traits guides visitation by the insects, ensuring precision in pollen gathering and deposition. The study, focused in the Southwest Australian Floristic Region, aimed to spot bee colour patterns that are usual and unusual, missing, accomplished by mimicry of pollen and anthers, and overlapping between mimic-model species in floral mimicry cases.

METHODS

Floral colour patterns were examined by false colour photography in 55 flower species of multiple highly diverse natural plant communities in south-west Australia. False colour photography is a method to transform a UV photograph and a colour photograph into a false colour photograph based on the trichromatic vision of bees. This method is particularly effective for rapid screening of large numbers of flowers for the presence of fine-scale bee-sensitive structures and surface roughness that are not detectable using standard spectrophotometry.

KEY RESULTS

Bee- and bird-pollinated flowers showed the expected but also some remarkable and unusual previously undetected floral colour pattern syndromes. Typical colour patterns include cases of pollen and flower mimicry and UV-absorbing targets. Among the atypical floral colour patterns are unusual white and UV-reflecting flowers of bee-pollinated plants, bicoloured floral guides, consistently occurring in Fabaceae spp., and flowers displaying a selective attractiveness to birds only. In the orchid genera (Diuris and Thelymitra) that employ floral mimicry of model species, we revealed a surprising mimicry phenomenon of anthers mimicked in turn by model species.

CONCLUSION

The study demonstrates the applicability of 'bee view' colour imaging for deciphering pollinator cues in a biodiverse flora with potential to be applied to other eco regions. The technique provides an exciting opportunity for indexing floral traits on a biome scale to establish pollination drivers of ecological and evolutionary relevance.

Clock-dated phylogeny for 48% of the 700 species of Crotalaria (Fabaceae-Papilionoideae) resolves sections worldwide and implies conserved flower and leaf traits throughout its pantropical range

Background

With some 700 species, the pantropical Crotalaria is among the angiosperm’s largest genera. We sampled 48% of the species from all sections (and representatives of the 15 remaining Crotalarieae genera) for nuclear and plastid DNA markers to infer changes in climate niches, flower morphology, leaf type, and chromosome numbers.

Results

Crotalaria is monophyletic and most closely related to African Bolusia (five species) from which it diverged 23 to 30 Ma ago. Ancestral state reconstructions reveal that leaf and flower types are conserved in large clades and that leaf type is uncorrelated to climate as assessed with phylogenetically-informed analyses that related compound vs. simple leaves to the mean values of four Bioclim parameters for 183 species with good occurrence data. Most species occur in open habitats <1000 m alt., and trifoliolate leaves are the ancestral condition, from which unifoliolate and simple leaves each evolved a few times, the former predominantly in humid, the latter mainly in dry climates. Based on chromosome counts for 36% of the 338 sequenced species, most polyploids are tetraploid and belong to a neotropical clade.

Conclusions

An unexpected finding of our study is that in Crotalaria, simple leaves predominate in humid climates and compound leaves in dry climates, which points to a different adaptive value of these morphologies, regardless of whether these two leaf types evolved rarely or frequently in our focal group.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-017-0903-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Changes in abundance and reproductive activity of small arid-zone murid rodents on an active cattle station in central Australia

Context Boom and bust population cycles are characteristic of many arid-zone rodents, but it is unknown to what extent these dynamics might be influenced by the presence of invasive rodents, such as the house mouse (Mus musculus) in Australia. Aim To determine whether the presence of M. musculus can have negative consequences on the population abundance and reproduction of two old Australian endemic rodents (the spinifex hopping mouse, Notomys alexis, and sandy inland mouse, Pseudomys hermannsburgensis). Methods The study took place on the sand dunes of a cattle station in central Australia. Population abundance was estimated as the number of individuals caught in small mammal traps, and female reproductive condition by external examination and, in a few cases, euthanasia and inspection of the reproductive tract. Key results Two synchronous periods of high abundance of N. alexis and M. musculus occurred several months after significant rainfall events, whereas the abundance of P. hermannsburgensis was consistently low. No reproduction took place in N. alexis or M. musculus when populations had reached high abundance. During low-rainfall periods, M. musculus was not detected on the sand dunes, and the two endemic species were sparsely distributed, with reproduction occasionally being evident. Conclusions During dry periods, M. musculus contracted back to refuges around the homestead and, after significant rainfall, it expanded onto the sand dunes and became abundant at the same time as did N. alexis. In contrast, and unlike in areas where M. musculus was generally rare, P. hermannsburgensis always remained at a low abundance. These patterns suggest that in areas of the natural environment close to human-modified sites, populations of at least one species of an old endemic rodent are supressed by the presence of M. musculus. Reproduction did not occur in the old endemics at times of high M. musculus abundance, but did take place in spring/early summer, even in some dry years. Implications The spread of M. musculus into the Australian arid zone may have had negative impacts on the population dynamics of P. hermannsburgensis. These findings suggest that the presence of human settlements has resulted in refuges for house mice, which periodically spread out into the natural environment during ‘boom’ times and adversely affect the natural population cycle of ecologically similar species such as P. hermannsburgensis.