Floral Traits and Plant Adaptation to Insect Pollinators: A Devil’s Advocate Approach

Certain natural history phenomena may provide a vivid illustration of selection in action and its adaptive products, and nearly every evolutionary biologist would agree that the pollination of flowers by animals provides a most illustrative example. It was surely not by chance that the first of Darwin’s books to be published after The Origin of Species was precisely his treatise on the “contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects” (Darwin, 1862), the first in a series of monographs aimed at providing detailed supporting evidence for the theory of natural selection. Darwin’s book on orchids evoked a major revolution in botany and gave rise to an enormous literature on pollination ecology (Ghiselin, 1984). It also marked the starting point for a tradition in the practice of pollination biology.