Title: Bene‘fit’ assessment in pollination coevolution: mechanistic perspectives on hummingbird bill-flower matching
Written with co-authors: Alejandro Rico-Guevara, Kristiina Hurme, and Avery Russell.
In this paper, we take a dive into the mechanisms of hummingbird-bill flower matching. We assess plant-animal pollinator networks and the mutualism that led to them. Ornithophilous pollination is a relatively recent development, yet there are currently a wide variety of bird-pollination strategies. We evaluate functional trait matching and the reciprocal benefits of bill-flower matching. This paper outlines these interactions in a hummingbird-plant lens, however it has broader implications of the rarely-quantified mechanisms of coevolutionary interactions.