Floral advertisement and the competition for pollination services

Flowering plants are a major component of terrestrial ecosystems, and most of them depend on animal pollinators for reproduction. Thus, the mutualism between flowering plants and their pollinators is a keystone ecological relationship in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Though plant–pollinator interactions have received considerable amount of attention, there are still many unanswered questions. In this paper, we use methods of evolutionary game theory to investigate the co-evolution of floral advertisement and pollinator preferencesOur results indicate that competition for pollination services among plant species can in some cases lead to specialization of the pollinator population to a single plant species (oligolecty). However, collecting pollen from multiple plants – at least at the population level – is evolutionarily stable under a wider parameter range. Finally, we show that, in the presence of pollinators, plants that optimize their investment in attracting vs. rewarding visiting pollinators outcompete plants that do not.

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