Decline of pollinators and attractiveness of the plants

Abstract

Flowering plants rely mostly on pollinators to reproduce. A decline of pollinators puts an evolutionary pressure on the allocation of plants’ resources towards attracting the few remaining pollinators. This may result in fewer resources available for the plants’ survival and actual seed production. Moreover, due to the “magnet effect”, attractive plants generally attract pollinators to all plants in their neighborhood, even the less attractive ones. To better understand the allocation trade-offs, we built a computer simulation and studied the evolution of resource allocation towards attracting pollinators. We observed that when pollinators are relatively abundant, there is not much incentive for the plants to allocate more energy to attract them. Only when pollinators are below a certain critical threshold is a relatively large investment in attracting the pollinators suddenly favored. The value of the critical threshold is quite low and further decreases with the increasing seed dispersal distance and the plant population size.