Lepidoptera as parasites

[Patrick Foley]

Gail and leps list,

    Lepidoptera are not always great pollinators. Have you watched a
Sphinx Moth hover well outside a flower while it takes nectar. No anther
will reach it there. But obviously many plants are adapted for moth and
butterfly visitation, with long thin tubular corollas. Some plants
flower nocturnally with white flowers and such skinny tubes that they
cannot be hoping for fruit bats. A wonderful book on pollination
evolution in the Phlox family was written by Verne and Karen Grant
(1965) Flower Pollination in the Phlox Family. V Grant has been a
professor at UT Austin.
    Another great book is more general, but it gives many recent
references to Lepidoptera pollination: Proctor, M. P. Teo and A. Lack
1996. The Natural History of Pollination. Timber Press, Portland Oregon.
This book should be inexpensively available.

    As Bob Schmalzel (Arizona Sonora Desert Museum) might put it, (pers
com), the whole history of flowering plants has probably been driven by
the conflict between getting pollinated and avoiding resource theft.
Large bees steal nectar by cutting holes in corollas. Butterflies often
take nectar without smearing themselves with pollen. The plants thinken
up their corollas, move their ovaries to safer places, stick their
anthers way out. Still a fair number of butterlies are, dare I say it,
largely parasites of the plants they visit.

Patrick Foley
patfoley at csus.edu



 
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