Plant phylogeny as a major predictor of flower visitation by nitidulid beetles, a lineage of ancestral angiosperm pollinators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plant phylogeny sometimes predicts interspecific variation in pollinator composition better than floral features, and its predictive value seems to differ among major groups of insect pollinators. Earlier findings suggesting that pollination by Plant phylogeny sometimes predicts interspecific variation in pollinator composition better than gross floral features, and its predictive value seems to differ among major groups of insect pollinators. Pollination by beetles exhibits the strongest phylogenetic signal and the strongest phylogenetic conservatism, which is particularly intriguing given that beetles were probably the pollinators of early angiosperms. We examine in this paper the relationship between plant phylogeny and flower visitation by nitidulid beetles (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae), an old monophyletic group of flower specialists and pollinators of gymnosperms and angiosperms. Using quantitative data on pollinator composition for 251 plant species (belonging to 167 genera in 46 families) from well-preserved Mediterranean montane habitats from southeastern Spain, the following questions were addressed: Is pollination by nitidulids correlated with plant phylogeny in the large species sample studied, and if it does, which are the relative importances of plant phylogeny, floral characteristics, and environmental features as predictors of nitidulid pollination in the plant assemblage studied ? Nitidulids were recorded in flowers of 25% of the plant species considered. Their distribution was significantly related to plant phylogeny, being clustered on certain lineages (Ranunculales, Malvales, Rosales, Asterales) and remarkably absent from others (e.g., Fabales, Lamiales). None of the environmental (habitat type, elevation) or macroscopic floral features considered (perianth type and color, flower mass) predicted nitidulid visitation after statistically accounting for the effect of plant phylogeny. We theorize that nitidulid beetles use characters of plants that track plant phylogeny at least as deep as the early radiation of the eudicots, imaginably characters such as the chemical signatures of pollen.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".