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Dependency on floral resources determines the animals’ responses to floral scents

Animal-pollinated angiosperms either depend on cross-pollination or may also reproduce after self-pollination – the former are thus obligately, the latter facultatively dependent on the service of animal-pollinators. Analogously, flower visitors either solely feed on floral resources or complement their diet with these, and are hence dependent or not on the flowers they visit. We assume that obligate flower visitors evolved abilities that enable them to effectively forage on flowers including mechanisms to bypass or tolerate floral defences such as morphological barriers and repellent / deterrent secondary metabolites. Facultative flower visitors, in contrast, are supposed to lack these adaptations and are often prevented to consume floral resources by defence mechanisms. In cases where obligate flower visitors are mutualists and facultative ones are antagonists, this dichotomy provides a solution for the plants’ dilemma to attract pollinators and simultaneously repel exploiters. In a meta-analysis, we recently supported this hypothesis: obligate flower visitors are attracted to floral scents, while facultative ones are repelled. Here, we add empirical evidence to these results: bumblebees and ants, obligate and facultative flower visitors, respectively, responded as predicted by the results of the meta-analysis to synthetic floral scent compounds.