Great Basin Butterfly-Pollen Interaction
Insects and the plants they interact with dominate terrestrial biomes and constitute over half of the earth’s macro-organismal diversity. Their abundance in museum collections can provide a wealth of natural history data if they are collected as part of careful ecological studies or conservation programs.
We summarize pollen-insect quantitative networks gleaned from adult lepidopteran museum specimens to characterize these interactions and to examine how richness and frequency of butterfly-pollen associations have changed over a 100-year time series in Nevada and California.
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Highlights
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Plant-pollinator interactions contribute substantially to biodiversity.
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Moderately generalized networks are likely to provide ecosystem stability in the face of anthropogenic global change.
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Pollen-butterfly interactions are changing in response to global change, especially more generalized interactions.
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Most pollen-butterfly interaction networks are specialized, which could make them more susceptible to anthropogenic change.
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Pollen diversity on Great Basin butterflies has declined over the past 100 years, concurrent with drought in the region.
