BOTANY SERIES
Introduction to Pollination Biology
Professor Tatyana Livshultz

This course is co-sponsored by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The lectures will be given at the PHS offices, 100 N. 20th Street (20th and Arch Streets), Philadelphia.

LECTURES BEGIN AT 6:30 PM

  1. Monday, April 5, 2010 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Pollination

    Introduction to the process of pollination and its discovery during the Enlightenment.

  2. Monday, April 12, 2010 - Birds Do It, Bees Do It
    A great diversity of flower forms are pollinated by a great diversity of animals. This has led to the idea of “pollination syndromes”. This class will examine the most commonly recognized pollination syndromes and investigate their use for predicting plant pollinators and the frequency of specialization in plant-pollinator interactions.

  3. Monday, April 19, 2010 - 50 Ways to Leave Your Pollinator
    Pollinator shifts, switches from one pollinating animal to another, have been proposed as one of the driving forces behind flowering plant speciation. We will discuss studies of pollinator shifts from bees to hummingbirds in two genera of North American wild flowers and what they tell about how and why pollinator shifts happen.

  4. Monday, April 26, 2010 - Giving and Getting (and Lying, Cheating, and Stealing)
    Pollination is usually a mutualistic interaction that benefits both parties. However, the leap from mutualism to parasitism is not that great. This class will look at the rewards that pollinators receive from flowers, the ways that plants lie and cheat their pollinators into providing services without rewards, and the ways animals steal rewards without providing pollination services.

  5. Monday, May 3, 2010 - Making the Most of the Pollinators You Have
    It is easy for us to think of the plant as the passive partner and the animal as the active one. In fact, plants manipulate pollinator behavior to maximize pollen transfer. This lecture will explore the variety of mechanisms that immobile plants have evolved to control their reproduction.  

  6. Monday, May 10, 2010 - The World Plants and Pollinators Made
    Pollination is an essential ecosystem service upon which human society depends. We will discuss the many ways we benefit from pollination and how human modification of the landscape is transforming plant-pollinator interactions.

Pollination evolved 360 million years ago with the evolution of seed plants and is ubiquitous in all landscapes dominated by them. This course will survey the science of pollination biology, including the discovery of plant pollination in the late seventeenth century, plant adaptations to animal pollination and how they evolve, the diversity of pollinating animals, the many ways that plants manipulate animals to achieve pollination, and the importance of pollination to humans. 

Recommended reading:

Floral Biology: Studies on Floral Evolution in Animal-Pollinated Plants. By David G. Lloyd and Spencer C.H. Barrett, eds. New York: Chapman & Hall, 1996.

Plant-Pollinator Interactions: From Specialization to Generalization. By Nickolas M. Waser and Jeff Ollerton, eds. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Owing to space limitations, this course requires preregistration.

Preregistration will begin on Monday, November 16, 2009.  To preregister, call 215-763-6529, ext. 23.

 

Close Window