Unravelling the mystery of red flowers in the Mediterranean Basin: How to be conspicuous in a place dominated by hymenopteran pollinators

Red-flowered species have traditionally been related to ornithophily, and the 'bee avoidance' hypothesis, i.e. red flower coloration is a way to reduce visits from hymenopterans, has been proposed to explain this association. In the Mediterranean Basin, ornithophily is almost absent, and hymenopterans are the most common group of pollinators. The fact that hymenopterans are virtually red-blind raises the question of how red-flowered species are pollinated in this region. Are these flowers pollinated by other groups of red-sensitive insects such as lepidopterans and coleopterans, or do they have visual cues that make them attractive to hymenopterans? We examined the reflectance spectra of 51 red-flowered species from the Mediterranean Basin and modelled these spectra in the visual system of hymenopterans, dipterans, coleopterans, and lepidopterans to obtain colour and conspicuousness. According to their reflectance curves, species were classified as pure red and UV-red flowers, and the p..., We sampled 51 red-flowered species from the Mediterranean Basin and recorded their reflectance spectra in the UV and visible light spectrum with a spectrophotometer. Reflectance data was processed using PAVO package (Maia et al., 2019) in R Studio. We also assesed the presence of UV or visible colour patterns in flowers and measure its reflectance spectra.
The data set includes values for main colour (red) and pattern of the sampled species for the pollinators visual models studied namely hymenopterans, dipterans, coleopterans and lepidopterans.  Data encompass chromatic contrast values, spectral purity and location of marker points using the online tool 'Spectral-MP' developed by Dorin et al. (2020).
References:
- Dorin, A., Shrestha, M., Herrmann, M., Burd, M. & Dyer, A. G. (2020). Automated calculation of spectral-reflectance marker-points to enable analysis of plant colour-signaling to pollinators. MethodsX, 7, 100827. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.100827
- Maia, R., Grus..., Data set is provided as a \".xlsx\" file.