Color-matching between pollen and corolla: hiding pollen via visual crypsis?

Abstract

Visual signals attractive to friends may also attract enemies. The bright colors of anthers and pollen have generally been thought to attract pollinators. We hypothesize that visual crypsis of anthers, and particularly pollen, should be favored in flowering plants because protection from pollen collectors reduces the loss of male gametes. To understand adaptive strategies relating to the color of pollen, we measured the color of pollen, undehisced anther sacs, and their background, the corolla, with a spectrometer for 104 insect-pollinated flowering species from a natural community in Hengduan Mountains, southwest China. The colors of anthers, pollen and corollas were diverse in these species. The color diversity of exposed pollen was significantly higher than that of concealed pollen (i.e. where anthers are enclosed or shielded by corollas). The color contrast between pollen and corolla was significantly smaller in species with exposed pollen than in those with concealed pollen. Unlike anther color, exposed pollen color tended to match its background corolla color. Our phylogenetic comparative analysis showed contrasting effects of pollen color patterns between flowers with exposed pollen and those with concealed pollen, revealing a strategy of hiding pollen from pollen thieves via visual crypsis.