A century of pollination success revealed by herbarium specimens of seed pods

Abstract

A widely observed pollinator decline around the world has led to the prediction that terrestrial ecosystems could be disrupted as plant pollination suffers, but declining pollination success has not been tested rigorously in wild plants, and it still remains unclear how pollination success of plant species responds differently in the context of pollinator decline. By viewing the number of seeds per pod as a quantitative measure of successful pollination, we examined seed pods in 4637 herbarium specimens of 109 obligately outcrossing legumes collected over the past century. We found that only 13 species showed significant temporal change with nine of those as an increase. None of the three subfamilies of legumes showed a consistent trend, and the subfamily Papilionoideae with the most specialized flowers, had increasing seed number per pod more often than decreasing. We conclude that legume pollination in China shows no sign of disruption and the effects of plant–pollinator disruption may be more complicated than simplistic predictions have allowed.