Food-deceptive pollination in Kaempferia rotunda ( Zingiberaceae)
Most animal pollinated plants for the success of reproduction have evolved a variety of floral morphological characters to attract pollinators, such as providing nectar, pollen, brood sites for the pollinators. However, non-rewarding flowers by deceptive pollination are found in 146 genera from 33 angiosperm families. These deceptive pollination patterns mainly appear in highly evolved orchid family which is renowned for its enormous diversity of pollination mechanisms. Recently,many kinds of pollination mechanisms and breeding systems were found in Zingiberaceae, such as delayed selfing mechanism,flexistyly and self-pollination by sliding pollen. Here a food-deceptive pollination mechanism in Kaempferia rotunda which was a new addition to the pollination systems in Zingiberaceae was reported. The pollination biology of K. rotunda was investigated in Nonghua,Guangxi Province in 2006 and South China Normal University Botanical Garden in 2007. The brilliant purple flowers open in the morning at about 5:30 - 6:00 and wither at 17:00 -18:00, lasting for about 11 -12 h. During an thesis, both pollen viability and stigma receptivity remained at a high level(＞90%). The mean P/0 ratio was 82. 20±47. 89(n = 20). Our observations showed that carpenter bee(Xylocopa sp. )was the main pollinator, and visits flowers only for nectar. However, the flowers produce no nectar. We speculated that K. rotunda exploited food deceptive mechanism to attract pollinators. Breeding system experiments showed that there was rare fruit set in Nonghua population of K. rotunda, which indicated K. rotunda might abandon sexual reproduction for some form of clonal reproduction.
Kaempferia rotundafood deceptionclonal reproductionpollinationbreeding system
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
维普
