Data from: Coflowering community context influences female fitness and alters the adaptive value of flower longevity in Mimulus guttatus

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to incorporate the complexity of
multispecies interactions into our understanding of microevolutionary
processes within populations. Although considerable work has been done on
antagonistic interactions (e.g., plant-herbivore), little attention has
been paid to the evolutionary implications of context dependency in
mutualistic interactions (e.g., plant-pollinator). In this study, we use
seep communities to evaluate how coflowering species richness affects key
aspects of pollination (visitation rate and conspecific and heterospecific
pollen receipt) of Mimulus guttatus. We assessed the importance of
coflowering diversity in mediating floral evolution by determining whether
species richness was associated with variation in flower size, longevity,
and stigma-anther distance and by conducting a reciprocal transplant
experiment in two contrasting pollination environments. We found lower
visitation rates and higher heterospecific pollen transfer to M. guttatus
growing in high-diversity coflowering communities compared to
low-diversity coflowering communities. We found a positive correlation
between flower longevity and coflowering species richness. Furthermore,
our reciprocal transplant experiment showed that extended flower longevity
was advantageous only in high-diversity seeps and identified coflowering
diversity as the most likely selective agent. Our results suggest that
coflowering diversity can promote floral trait differentiation among
populations, in this case, flower longevity.