ArticleAnnals of botany2020
Pollen adaptation to ant pollination: a case study from the Proteaceae.
Article in Annals of botany, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loss of pollinator diversity consistently reduces reproductive success for wild and cultivated plants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Pooled it
- Invasive honeybees exacerbate the low reproductive success of a bat-pollinated tree.Journal of plant research · 2026Article
- Exchanging Genes Within a City: Analysis of Pollen Flow Patterns in a Narrow Endemic Plant Species Threatened by Urbanisation.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Ants as Flower Visitors: Diversity and Network Structure Assessed for the First Time in the Atlantic Forest of Southern Brazil.Neotropical entomology · 2025Article
- The Greasy Pole Syndrome inPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Ants are more than just curious bystanders to some flowers-they act as significant pollinators.Frontiers in insect science · 2023Review
- Mixed pollination system and floral signals of Paepalanthus (Eriocaulaceae): insects and geitonogamy ensure high reproductive success.Annals of botany · 2022Article
- Distance Dependent Contribution of Ants to Pollination but Not Defense in a Dioecious, Ambophilous Gymnosperm.Frontiers in plant science · 2021Article
- In search of unusual interactions. A commentary on: 'Pollen adaptation to ant pollination: a case study from the Proteaceae'.Annals of botany · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsAnt-plant associations are widely diverse and distributed throughout the world, leading to antagonistic and/or mutualistic interactions. Ant pollination is a rare mutualistic association and reports of ants as effective pollinators are limited to a few studies. Conospermum (Proteaceae) is an insect-pollinated genus well represented in the south-western Australia biodiversity hotspot, and here we aimed to evaluate the role of ants as pollinators of C. undulatum.
methodsPollen germination after contact with several species of ants and bees was tested for C. undulatum and five co-flowering species for comparison. We then sampled the pollen load of floral visitors of C. undulatum to assess whether ants carried a pollen load sufficient to enable pollination. Lastly, we performed exclusion treatments to assess the relative effect of flying- and non-flying-invertebrate floral visitors on the reproduction of C. undulatum. For this, we measured the seed set under different conditions: ants exclusion, flying-insects exclusion and control. KEY
resultsPollen of C. undulatum, along with the other Conospermum species, had a germination rate after contact with ants of ~80 % which did not differ from the effect of bees; in contrast, the other plant species tested showed a drop in the germination rate to ~10 % following ant treatments. Although ants were generalist visitors, they carried a pollen load with 68-86 % of suitable grains. Moreover, ants significantly contributed to the seed set of C. undulatum.
conclusionsOur study highlights the complexity of ant-flower interactions and suggests that generalizations neglecting the importance of ants as pollinators cannot be made. Conospermum undulatum has evolved pollen with resistance to the negative effect of ant secretions on pollen grains, with ants providing effective pollination services to this threatened species.
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