| 英文摘要
| A Classic view asserted that floral color assembly could be shaped by the pollinator preference. However, the floral color assembly could be alternatively explained by
competition for pollinators they shared.
Here, we analyzed the floral color assembly from low altitude to alpine region in a subtropical island Taiwan, through the bee perceptual color space, in an effort to evaluate whether these two models could compatibly account for the floral color assembly along altitudes. We found that the diversity of the floral colors in middle (1500-2200 m) and high altitudes (over 2850 m) were significantly lower than that of low altitude regions (below 900 m), which could be partly explained by the declined abundance of pollinators with increasing altitudes. Moreover, the chromatic signals of the alpine species most fit with the discrimination ability of bees’ vision, which suggested that bees might be the most important pollinator in the subtropical alpine regions.
In addition, the alpine species exhibited larger divergence of the floral colors than expected by chance, but no similar trends were observed in low and middle altitude. When considering phylogenetic structure, sympatric alpine species tend to be phylogenetically related (clustering) but floral colors of related species tend to be diverse (weak phylogenetic signal). This suggested that the over-dispersion of floral color among related alpine species may be the result of their competition for limited pollinators.
Overall, our results first demonstrated that the floral color assembly along altitudes in a subtropical island could respectively adapted to the pollinator preference model and competition mode. |
