Air pollutants degrade floral scents and increase insect foraging times

Abstract

Flowers emit mixtures of scents that mediate plant-insect interactions such as attracting insect pollinators. Because of their volatile nature, however, floral scents readily react with ozone, nitrate radical, and hydroxyl radical. The result of such reactions is the degradation and the chemical modification of scent plumes downwind of floral sources. Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are developed to investigate dispersion and chemical degradation and modification of floral scents due to reactions with ozone, hydroxyl radical, and nitrate radical within the atmospheric surface layer. Impacts on foraging insects are investigated by utilizing a random walk model to simulate insect search behavior. Results indicate that even moderate air pollutant levels (e.g., ozone mixing ratios greater than 60 parts per billion on a per volume basis, ppbv) substantially degrade floral volatiles and alter the chemical composition of released floral scents. As a result, insect success rates of locating plumes of floral scents were reduced and foraging times increased in polluted air masses due to considerable degradation and changes in the composition of floral scents. Results also indicate that plant-pollinator interactions could be sensitive to changes in floral scent composition, especially if insects are unable to adapt to the modified scentscape. The increase in foraging time could have severe cascading and pernicious impacts on the fitness of foraging insects by reducing the time devoted to other necessary tasks.

Floral volatiles structure plant–pollinator interactions in a diverse community across the growing season

“…These findings also have implications for plant–pollinator interactions as floral VOCs (e.g. Fuentes, Chamecki, Roulston, Chen, & Pratt, ; Glenny et al, ) and phenologies (Cleland, Chuine, Menzel, Mooney, & Schwartz, ), and thus co‐occurring species, shift due to climate change. Given that the influence of floral scents on pollinator attraction can range from the individual‐level (e.g.…”

Frontiers in Invertebrate Physiology—An Update to the Grand Challenge

“…Ecophysiological approaches with recent advances include system biology approaches (using modeling) (Damos et al, 2018) and adaptations to stress conditions (Tang et al, 2017). Climate change and pollution have also recently been shown to change intra-and interspecific communication channels (Boullis et al, 2016;Fuentes et al, 2016;Jürgens and Bischoff, 2017). However, the field of ecophysiology is only at its beginning and major research efforts in this field are needed in the future.…”

Wind drives temporal variation in pollinator visitation in a fragmented tropical forest

“…The mechanical and physiological challenges posed by wind may have important effects on their interactions with plants, including herbivory [16,17], and pollinator visitation and landing [18]. Wind also indirectly impacts flying insects by inducing plant movements [19], which can impose additional maneuverability challenges [14] In addition to biophysical challenges, wind also disperses chemical cues and signals critical for interactions between insects (e.g., attracting mates [20], or locating prey [21,22]), as well as between insects and plants (e.g., pollinator attraction [23][24][25] and herbivory [26]). Turbulence (i.e.…”