Meeting Abstract
Plant-pollinator interactions play profound roles in structuring ecological communities and populations. Pollinators use their sense of smell to locate flowers from long distances, but little is known about how they are able to discriminate their target odor from the rest of the plant community, and how flower species are able to attract specific pollinators. Using a combination of field assays, chemical analytical methods, and neurophysiological experiments in the insect peripheral and central nervous system, we seek to determine how chemical communication systems mediate these interactions between plants and their pollinators. Our results suggest that, in many cases, evolutionary distant flower species have converged to emit similar bouquets to attract the same type of pollinator, whereas in other cases the flowers emit scents that mimic odors from other biologically important sources (eg, mates or hosts). In all examples, flower scents are represented by distinct neural representations in the insect antennal (olfactory) lobe suggesting that the scents activate conserved neural circuits to elicit behaviors mediating these mutualistic associations. However, the behavior and neural representation to these flower scents are sensitive to the background of volatiles in the environment. Together, these results provide new evidence that in insect pollinators, attraction to specific flowers is mediated by the precise integration of olfactory ‘channels’, and that alteration of the odor input transforms the network representations.
