Laboratório de Ecologia de Interações & Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade Animal, Departamento de Ecologia Zoologia e Genética, Universidade Federal de Pelotas-UFPel, Pelotas, Brazil.
Centro de Síntese Ecológica e Conservação, Departamento de Genética, Ecologia e Evolução, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais-UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
J Anim Ecol. 2023 Sep;92(9):1676-1679. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13972.
Research Highlight: Leimberger, K.G., Hadley, A.S., & Betts, M.G. (2023). Plant-hummingbird pollination networks exhibit minimal rewiring after experimental removal of a locally abundant plant species. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13935. In this paper, Leimberger, Hadley and Betts (2023) explore the effects of removing a locally abundant plant species on plant-hummingbird pollination networks. They experimentally prevented access of hummingbirds to flowers of Heliconia tortuosa and assessed subsequent changes in the interactions between plants and hummingbirds. Their main hypothesis postulated that the loss of a highly connected species would lead to interaction rewiring and niche expansions by hummingbirds, decreasing individual, species and network specialization. However, they found that the overall structure of the plant-hummingbird networks remains mostly unaltered, with limited rewiring and minimal changes in specialization. The main contributions of this study can be summarized as (i) it adds to a limited number of manipulative studies on the capacity of species to rewire their interactions following the loss of partners, and importantly, it is the first study from the tropics and with vertebrate pollinators, for which experimental studies at appropriate scales is intrinsically more challenging; and (ii) innovates by evaluating change in specialization for the individual level, carried out through pollen sampling on the body of hummingbirds. The limited change in species interactions highlights that network stability through interaction rewiring may have been overestimated in previous studies, calling for further manipulative studies in the field. At the same time, it also indicated that even the loss of a highly abundant plant species has an overall small effect on network structure. Thus, this study contributes timely findings regarding the capacity of ecological communities to respond to species extinctions.
Leimberger、Hadley 和 Betts（2023 年）研究了在实验去除一种当地丰富的植物物种后，植物-蜂鸟传粉网络的最小重连情况。他们通过实验阻止蜂鸟接触 Heliconia tortuosa 的花朵，并评估植物和蜂鸟之间随后的相互作用变化。他们的主要假设是，失去一种高度连接的物种会导致蜂鸟的相互作用重连和生态位扩展，从而降低个体、物种和网络的专业化程度。然而，他们发现植物-蜂鸟网络的整体结构基本保持不变，只有有限的重连和最小的专业化变化。这项研究的主要贡献可以概括为：（i）它增加了有限的关于物种在失去伙伴后重新建立相互作用的能力的操纵性研究，重要的是，这是第一项来自热带地区的、以脊椎动物传粉者为研究对象的研究，对于此类研究，在适当的尺度上进行实验研究本质上更具挑战性；（ii）通过对蜂鸟身体上的花粉取样来评估个体水平专业化的变化，从而实现创新。物种相互作用的有限变化表明，通过相互作用重连实现网络稳定性可能在以前的研究中被高估了，这呼吁在野外进行进一步的操纵性研究。同时，这也表明，即使是失去一种高度丰富的植物物种，对网络结构的总体影响也很小。因此，这项研究为生态群落应对物种灭绝的能力提供了及时的发现。
