Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:30:47.598Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Bats as pollinators: foraging energetics and floral adaptations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2009

Lars Chittka
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
James D. Thomson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access

Summary

Bat pollination is a pan-tropical phenomenon, performed in the Old World by small megachiropterans (Pteropodidae) and in the New World by microchiropterans of the leaf-nosed bat family Phyllostomidae (Dobat 1985). Flower-visiting bat species total about 50 worldwide, while Dobat (1985) listed about 750 bat-pollinated plant species in 270 genera (590 for the Neo- and 160 for the Palaeotropics). Since then, many more cases have been found.

Although plants independently enlisted “megabats” and “microbats” as pollinators, it is likely that both systems have links to one common root: pollination by ancient, nocturnal, non-flying mammals dating to the late Cretaceous (Sussman & Raven 1978). The extinction of most of these early mammalian flower visitors coincided with the radiation of bats from the Eocene onward in the Old World, and during the Miocene in South America (Sussman & Raven 1978). Genera like Parkia may have developed mammal pollination before the separation of African and South American plates; they still retain this trait (Vogel 1969, 1980). Of the plant species found to attract bats today, however, the vast majority evolved their adaptative traits more recently (Vogel 1990).

In the Neotropics, it is useful to consider a continuum ranging from less specialized “fruit-bat” flowers to true “glossophagine” flowers (von Helversen 1993; cf. Johnson & Steiner 2000). For Costa Rica, we estimate that two-thirds of the bat-pollinated plant species are glossophagine specialists.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cognitive Ecology of Pollination
Animal Behaviour and Floral Evolution
, pp. 148 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×