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Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon

Nectar is the most common floral reward for flower-visiting flies, bees, bats and birds. Many flowers hide nectar in the floral tube and preclude sensing of nectar by flower-visitors from a distance. Even in those flowers that offer easily accessible nectar, the nectaries are mostly inconspicuous to...

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Autores principales: Lunau, Klaus, Ren, Zong-Xin, Fan, Xiao-Qing, Trunschke, Judith, Pyke, Graham H., Wang, Hong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7184725/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32341437
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63997-3
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author Lunau, Klaus
Ren, Zong-Xin
Fan, Xiao-Qing
Trunschke, Judith
Pyke, Graham H.
Wang, Hong
author_facet Lunau, Klaus
Ren, Zong-Xin
Fan, Xiao-Qing
Trunschke, Judith
Pyke, Graham H.
Wang, Hong
author_sort Lunau, Klaus
collection PubMed
description Nectar is the most common floral reward for flower-visiting flies, bees, bats and birds. Many flowers hide nectar in the floral tube and preclude sensing of nectar by flower-visitors from a distance. Even in those flowers that offer easily accessible nectar, the nectaries are mostly inconspicuous to the human eye and the amount of nectar is sparse. It is widely accepted that many flowers display nectar guides in order to direct flower-visitors towards the nectar. Using false colour photography, covering ultraviolet, blue and green ranges of wavelength, revealed a yet unknown conspicuousness of nectar, nectaries and false nectaries for bees due to concordant reflection in the ultraviolet range of wavelength. Nectars, many nectaries and false nectaries have glossy surfaces and reflect all incident light including UV-light. In most cases, this is not particularly conspicuous to the human eye, but highly visible for UV-sensitive insects, due to the fact that the glossy areas are often positioned in UV-absorbing central flower parts and thus produce a strong UV-signal. The optical contrast produced by the glossiness of small smooth areas in close proximity to nectar holders represents a widespread yet overlooked floral cue that nectarivorous flower-visitors might use to locate the floral nectar.
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spelling pubmed-71847252020-05-04 Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon Lunau, Klaus Ren, Zong-Xin Fan, Xiao-Qing Trunschke, Judith Pyke, Graham H. Wang, Hong Sci Rep Article Nectar is the most common floral reward for flower-visiting flies, bees, bats and birds. Many flowers hide nectar in the floral tube and preclude sensing of nectar by flower-visitors from a distance. Even in those flowers that offer easily accessible nectar, the nectaries are mostly inconspicuous to the human eye and the amount of nectar is sparse. It is widely accepted that many flowers display nectar guides in order to direct flower-visitors towards the nectar. Using false colour photography, covering ultraviolet, blue and green ranges of wavelength, revealed a yet unknown conspicuousness of nectar, nectaries and false nectaries for bees due to concordant reflection in the ultraviolet range of wavelength. Nectars, many nectaries and false nectaries have glossy surfaces and reflect all incident light including UV-light. In most cases, this is not particularly conspicuous to the human eye, but highly visible for UV-sensitive insects, due to the fact that the glossy areas are often positioned in UV-absorbing central flower parts and thus produce a strong UV-signal. The optical contrast produced by the glossiness of small smooth areas in close proximity to nectar holders represents a widespread yet overlooked floral cue that nectarivorous flower-visitors might use to locate the floral nectar. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-04-27 /pmc/articles/PMC7184725/ /pubmed/32341437 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63997-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Lunau, Klaus
Ren, Zong-Xin
Fan, Xiao-Qing
Trunschke, Judith
Pyke, Graham H.
Wang, Hong
Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
title Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
title_full Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
title_fullStr Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
title_full_unstemmed Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
title_short Nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
title_sort nectar mimicry: a new phenomenon
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7184725/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32341437
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63997-3
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