Recognition of flowers by pollinators

Abstract

The flowers of angiosperm plants present us with a staggering diversity of signal designs, but how did this diversity evolve? Answering this question requires us to understand how pollinators analyze these signals with their visual and olfactory sense organs, and how the sensory systems work together with post-receptor neural wiring to produce a coherent percept of the world around them. Recent research on the dynamics with which bees store, manage and retrieve memories all have fundamental implications on how pollinators choose between flowers, and in turn for floral evolution. New findings regarding how attention, peak shift phenomena, and speed accuracy tradeoffs affect pollinator choice between flower species show that analyzing the evolutionary ecology of signal-receiver relationships can substantially benefit from knowledge about neural mechanisms of visual and olfactory information processing.