Color & chemistry: How flowers signal reward quality to pollinators

Plants attract pollinators via brightly coloured, fragrant flowers. Visiting pollinators obtain a nutritious reward such as pollen and nectar. This project studies the evolution of flower colour and fragrance with regard to pollinators’ visual and olfactory systems. It determines whether colour and scent convey information on the composition of floral rewards. The results of this project will yield fundamental insights into the interaction of plants and pollinators and have applied relevance for, for example, food production and conservation biology.