Cargando…
Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns
Flowers act as multisensory billboards to pollinators by using a range of sensory modalities such as visual patterns and scents. Different floral organs release differing compositions and quantities of the volatiles contributing to floral scent, suggesting that scent may be patterned within flowers....
Autores principales: | , , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2018
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6015847/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29899070 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0661 |
_version_ | 1783334468712398848 |
---|---|
author | Lawson, David A. Chittka, Lars Whitney, Heather M. Rands, Sean A. |
author_facet | Lawson, David A. Chittka, Lars Whitney, Heather M. Rands, Sean A. |
author_sort | Lawson, David A. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Flowers act as multisensory billboards to pollinators by using a range of sensory modalities such as visual patterns and scents. Different floral organs release differing compositions and quantities of the volatiles contributing to floral scent, suggesting that scent may be patterned within flowers. Early experiments suggested that pollinators can distinguish between the scents of differing floral regions, but little is known about how these potential scent patterns might influence pollinators. We show that bumblebees can learn different spatial patterns of the same scent, and that they are better at learning to distinguish between flowers when the scent pattern corresponds to a matching visual pattern. Surprisingly, once bees have learnt the spatial arrangement of a scent pattern, they subsequently prefer to visit novel unscented flowers that have an identical arrangement of visual marks, suggesting that multimodal floral signals may exploit the mechanisms by which learnt information is stored by the bee. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6015847 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-60158472018-06-25 Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns Lawson, David A. Chittka, Lars Whitney, Heather M. Rands, Sean A. Proc Biol Sci Behaviour Flowers act as multisensory billboards to pollinators by using a range of sensory modalities such as visual patterns and scents. Different floral organs release differing compositions and quantities of the volatiles contributing to floral scent, suggesting that scent may be patterned within flowers. Early experiments suggested that pollinators can distinguish between the scents of differing floral regions, but little is known about how these potential scent patterns might influence pollinators. We show that bumblebees can learn different spatial patterns of the same scent, and that they are better at learning to distinguish between flowers when the scent pattern corresponds to a matching visual pattern. Surprisingly, once bees have learnt the spatial arrangement of a scent pattern, they subsequently prefer to visit novel unscented flowers that have an identical arrangement of visual marks, suggesting that multimodal floral signals may exploit the mechanisms by which learnt information is stored by the bee. The Royal Society 2018-06-13 2018-06-13 /pmc/articles/PMC6015847/ /pubmed/29899070 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0661 Text en © 2018 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Behaviour Lawson, David A. Chittka, Lars Whitney, Heather M. Rands, Sean A. Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
title | Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
title_full | Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
title_fullStr | Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
title_full_unstemmed | Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
title_short | Bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
title_sort | bumblebees distinguish floral scent patterns, and can transfer these to corresponding visual patterns |
topic | Behaviour |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6015847/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29899070 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0661 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT lawsondavida bumblebeesdistinguishfloralscentpatternsandcantransferthesetocorrespondingvisualpatterns AT chittkalars bumblebeesdistinguishfloralscentpatternsandcantransferthesetocorrespondingvisualpatterns AT whitneyheatherm bumblebeesdistinguishfloralscentpatternsandcantransferthesetocorrespondingvisualpatterns AT randsseana bumblebeesdistinguishfloralscentpatternsandcantransferthesetocorrespondingvisualpatterns |