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Mutualisms involve cooperation, but also frequently involve conflict. Plant-pollinator mutualisms are no exception. To facilitate animal pollination, flowering plants often offer pollen (their male gametes) as a food reward. Since plants benefit by maximizing pollen export to conspecific flowers, we might expect plants to cheat on pollen rewards. In intersexual floral mimicry, rewarding pollen-bearing male flowers (models) are mimicked by rewardless female flowers (mimics) on the same plant. Pollinators should therefore learn to avoid the unrewarding mimics. Plants might impede such learning by producing phenotypically variable flowers that cause bees to generalize among models and mimics during learning. In this laboratory study, we used partially artificial flowers (artificial petals, live reproductive parts) modeled after Begonia odorata to test whether variation in the size of rewarding male flowers (models) and unrewarding female flowers (mimics) affected how quickly bees learned

United statesSerra do marEstado do rioUnited kingdomCity ofWald chi squareLe corffRachel wilkinsRr development core teamImagej national institutes of healthOxford university pressMissouri state universityCognitive science societyOxford universitySage publications incR foundation for statistical computing