Asking the pikas politely…
Due to climate change, wildflowers are blooming earlier and earlier and suffering lower reproductive success. There are two general, non-mutually-exclusive hypotheses about why this lower reproductive success may be occurring. One is that plants are blooming before their pollinators and therefore are experiencing a pollen deficiency. The other is that plants are coping with other environmental effects associated with earlier bloom time, such as drought and frost, which directly affect their survival and reproduction. Here I used a snow removal experiment to stimulate earlier flowering and measured pollen receipt, a proxy for pollinator visitation, and seed set. I also used pollen supplementation experiments to attempt to distinguish the effects of potential pollinator deficiency vs. other environmental factors on plant reproduction. I found that plants in the snow removal treatment received significantly less pollen than the plants in the controls; however, I failed to provide additional pollen in the pollen supplementation experiment and so I could not experimentally assess whether pollen limitation affected seed set. Nevertheless, these results suggest that early-blooming plants suffer harsh abiotic conditions, causing them to divert less energy to pollinator attraction in favor of seed creation and survival.
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