Lavender's beautifully scented blooms attract bees to its nectar rich flowers and throughout the summer months can be heard buzzing with activity. How these forests, and their prior pollination networks, may recover is uncertain.Lavender is a favorite of both homeowners planning a dry garden or Mediterranean gardens, and pollinators. Australia has not been immune to the clearing of rainforest (and associated eucalypt-dominated wet sclerophyll forest), with the impact of these historical losses further exacerbated by the cataclysmic landscape scale bushfires and extreme drought events that devastated vast swathes of eastern Australia’s forests in 2019-2020. Globally rainforests continue to be a focus of conservation concern, not least owing to the ongoing clearing of tropical forests that threatens the world’s biodiversity and consequent devastation to pollinators and the crucial pollination services that these provide. Consequently the flowers of many rainforest plants give little clear morphological insight as to what specific pollinators their flowers are seeking to attract. In general however, there is great variety in floral shape, colour, nectar volume, nectar type and structural presentation of flowers within rainforest strata. Flowers with tubular corollas suggest adaptation for pollination by birds (notably meliphagid honeyeaters) and long-tongued Lepidoptera (though apart from hawkmoths the role of moths is poorly understood). Invertebrate-adapted flowers are more commonly white or creamish-white in colour, and usually possess shallow readily accessible flowers which individually produce small amounts of nectar. Vertebrate-adapted flowers are often brightly coloured, have floral structures that tend to be more complex in form, and produce nectar in greater volume. Though size reduces an individual’s ability to carry large pollen loads this is made up for by absolute numbers.īy comparison vertebrates play a lesser role than they do in non-rainforest communities, though nevertheless are important agents of pollination for some plant families with highly adapted flower forms such as the Proteaceae and Castanospermum australe of the Fabaceae. In subtropical rainforests most pollinating insects, collectively cohorts of Diptera, Coleoptera and Hymenoptera, are smaller than 7 mm in size. These can be mixed assemblages of birds, blossom bats and insects, as in the North Queensland Syzygium cormiflorum (Myrtaceae), or more typically pollinator assemblages comprised exclusively of insects, of which native bees may only constitute a small proportion. But in all rainforests, ‘generalist’ pollination ecologies prevail – that is, plants recruit from a broad suite of potential pollinators. Their flowers emit strong fragrances that attract pollinating beetles, and after pollination the fused flower structures fall away as single units, carrying the beetles’ eggs to the ground, there to develop in the soil and from which new adults will later emerge. In keeping with the role played by invertebrates as principal agents of pollination in Australia’s rainforests, it provides an extensive discussion of plant-invertebrate mutualisms and co-evolution.Įupomatia are members of the evolutionarily conservative Eupomatiaceae, a numerically small family largely restricted to eastern Australia. The book features approximately 150 colour photos of plants, pollinators and rainforest ecosystems. Subtitled Pollination Ecology and Plant Evolution this significantly expanded volume includes new information on the impacts of climate change, fire, fragmentation, invasive species and destructive pathogens. Invertebrates are essential in pollinating our rainforests – but how do climate change, fire, fragmentation, invasive species and destructive pathogens impact pollination networks? Dr Geoff Williams OAM, AM, explores how in this Second Edition of The Flowering of Australia’s Rainforests.ĭrawing on 50 years of field and research experience by Australian Museum Research Associate and author Geoff Williams, the recently published Second Edition of The Flowering of Australia’s Rainforests provides a comprehensive introduction to the pollination ecology, evolution and conservation of Australian rainforest plants in a world context, with particular emphasis on subtropical rainforests and their associated pollinators.

Nectar flower