Study of floral visitation on Leea asiatica

Leea asiatica (L.) Ridsdale is a common understory shrub in lowland moist deciduous forests of Western Ghats. It is visited by a variety of insects, which makes it interesting to study visitation dynamics and diversity. The objective is to get an overall view of this system and find gross trends. The work was carried out in a semi urban locality, near Aarey forest, in Mumbai, India. The field work lasted over a total of 13 days in August 2020. Data was sampled through video recordings of visitor activity on a single inflorescence every day. Visitor activity was recorded from 8am to 2pm, every 30mins. For visitation rate, the number of visits to the inflorescence and in the inflorescence, visitor identity, and time of entry and exit (for time spent on the inflorescence) were noted. For looking at visitation dynamics Apis florea was used as the candidate species because it was the most frequent visitor. Frequent visitors on Leea asiatica, were Apis florea, Braunsapis sp, members of Calliphoridae and Ceratina sp, in respective order. A total of 26 species visited L.asiatica over 13 days. The Simpsons diversity index (D) is 0.3. Mean visitation rate is 0.7±0.46 visits/inflorescence/min and 0.6 ±0.37 visits/flower/min. Overall number of visits and visitation rate dropped from 8am in the morning to 2pm in the afternoon. Handling time gradually increased till 1pm and started to drop. The trends are not always very strong as these are gross estimations and other variables were not controlled for.