Publications by authors named "Frank Andrew Jones"
Article Synopsis
- Pollinators, like bees and butterflies, choose different ways to find flowers, and this affects how plants reproduce.
- The study focuses on Heliconia tortuosa, a type of plant, to see how these foraging methods impact plant mating with different pollen donors.
- Researchers found that pollinators mainly use a complete route system to gather nectar, which helps plants mix pollen from multiple sources and doesn’t lead to plants mostly mating with their neighbors.
In tropical forests, insect herbivores exert significant pressure on plant populations. Adaptation to such pressure is hypothesized to be a driver of high tropical diversity, but direct evidence for local adaptation to herbivory in tropical forests is sparse. At the same time, herbivore pressure has been hypothesized to increase with rainfall in the tropics, which could lead to differences among sites in the degree of local adaptation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnimal-mediated pollination is essential for the maintenance of plant reproduction, especially in tropical ecosystems, where pollination networks have been thought to have highly generalized structures. However, accumulating evidence suggests that not all floral visitors provide equally effective pollination services, potentially reducing the number of realized pollinators and increasing the cryptic specialization of pollination networks. Thus, there is a need to understand how different functional groups of pollinators influence pollination success.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Mangroves are critical ecosystems facing threats, and this study aimed to analyze gene flow in two species, Avicennia germinans and Rhizophora mangle, across different estuaries in Panama by examining genetic markers.
- Both species demonstrated similar outcrossing rates, but A. germinans exhibited stronger genetic structure and diversity compared to R. mangle.
- The study found that the Central American Isthmus acts as a significant barrier to gene flow, leading to low genetic exchange within estuaries and suggesting that physical geography and rare long-distance seed dispersal events may impact genetic distribution in mangroves.