Data from: Plant connectivity underlies plant-pollinator-exploiter distributions in Ficus petiolaris and associated pollinating and non-pollinating fig wasps

Mutualism is ubiquitous in nature, and nursery pollination mutualisms
provide a system well suited to quantifying the benefits and costs of
symbiotic interactions. In nursery pollination mutualisms, pollinators
reproduce within the inflorescence they pollinate, with benefits and costs
being measured in the numbers of pollinator offspring and seeds produced.
This type of mutualism is also typically exploited by seed-consuming
non-pollinators that obtain resources from plants without providing
pollination services. Theory predicts that the rate at which
pollen-bearing “foundresses” visit a plant will strongly affect the
plant's production of pollinator offspring, non-pollinator offspring,
and seeds. Spatially aggregated plants are predicted to have high rates of
foundress visitation, increasing pollinator and seed production, and
decreasing non-pollinator production; very high foundress visitation may
also decrease seed production indirectly through the production of
pollinators. Working with a nursery mutualism comprised of the Sonoran
Desert rock fig, Ficus petiolaris, and host-specific pollinating and
non-pollinating fig wasps, we use linear models to evaluate four
hypotheses linking species interactions to benefits and costs: 1)
foundress density increases with host-tree connectivity, 2) pollinator
production increases with foundress density, and 3) non-pollinator
production and 4) seed production decrease with pollinator production. We
also directly test how tree connectivity affects non-pollinator
production. We find strong support for our four hypotheses, and we
conclude that tree connectivity is a key driver of foundress visitation,
thereby strongly affecting spatial distributions in the F. petiolaris
community. We also find that foundress visitation decreases at the
northernmost edge of the F. petiolaris range. Finally, we find
species-specific effects of tree connectivity on non-pollinators to be
strongly correlated with previously estimated non-pollinator dispersal
abilities. We conclude that plant connectivity is highly important for
predicting plant-pollinator-exploiter dynamics, and discuss the
implications of our results for species coexistence and adaptation.