Estimating pollination success with artificial flowers

By James D. Thomson, Jane E. Ogilvie, Takashi T. Makino, Angela Arisz, Sneha Raju, Vanessa Rojas-Luengas, Marcus Tan

An artificial flower

Investigators of the interactions between plants and pollinating animals have frequently resorted to artificial flowers to clarify aspects of pollinator preferences and choice-making.  Such experiments typically present animals with arrays of multiple phenotypes of “flowers” constructed to vary in particular characters; animals’ responses are measured as the visitation rates to the different floral phenotypes.

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Read the scientific publication in JPE .