Abstract
IN the dry months from January to March in Central America there is an abundance of flowering trees and shrubs1–3 and many of them are pollinated by bats. When collecting nectar, the bats visit various species of plants4–6, and in periods of peak abundance of flowers they make increasingly frequent visits. With flowering apparently synchronised3,4, there seems to be a good chance that flowers may not always receive conspecific pollen, thus reducing their seed set and fitness. The study reported here suggests that this chance is minimised because nectar and pollen are available at different times on different flower species, and because some species deposit and receive pollen at distinct regions of the bats' bodies.
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HOWELL, D. Time sharing and body partitioning in bat–plant pollination systems. Nature 270, 509–510 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1038/270509a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/270509a0
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