2011/07/06 by James Cresswell, Cresswell, James E., Laura Hernández +1
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior #Plant Parasitism and Resistance #Plant and animal studies #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1107.1100
openalex publication_date 2011/07/06 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Community ecologists are principally occupied with the proposition that natural assemblages of species exhibit orderliness and with identifying its causes. Plant-pollinator networks exhibit a variety of orderly properties, one of which is 'nestedness'. Nestedness has been attributed to various causes, but we propose a further influence arising from the phylogenetic structure of the biochemical constraints on the pollen diets of bees. We use an artificial assemblage as an opportunity to isolate the action of this mechanism. The properties of the network that we studied are consistent with the proposition that nestedness is caused by the phylogeny of diet range in bees, but the claim is preliminary and we propose that valuable progress in understanding plant-pollinator systems may be made through applying the techniques of chemical ecology at the community scale.