Wild insect flower visitor assemblages and resource use in tropical gardens: driven by floral offer, modulated by honeybees
摘要
Assessing how gardens’ floral offer influences flower visitors is essential to enhancing gardens’ capacity to sustain flower visitors under anthropogenic change, especially in biodiversity hotspot regions experiencing rapid urban expansion, such as the Caribbean islands. In this context, floral offer and plant-insect interactions were monitored monthly over one year in eight tropical garden sites in Martinique, Lesser Antilles, where spontaneous plants, ornamentals, and plants grown for consumption coexisted. Additionally, plant and wild insect traits were measured and nectar sugar evenness among insect-visited plants was quantified. Using structural equation modelling, we investigated how garden floral offer shapes wild insect assemblages and their resource use. Unlike ornamentals, the floral density of spontaneous plants enhanced wild insect species richness, indirectly promoting flower-wild insect trait matching and resource partitioning among wild insects. Greater plant species richness density and floral density from plants grown for consumption increased the interaction abundance of the managed super-generalist honeybee, which in turn constrained resource partitioning among wild insects and reduced their interaction abundance. Sugar evenness among visited plants also promoted honeybee interaction abundance but concurrently buffered its negative effect on wild insect interaction abundance. Although some plant traits acted as guild-specific drivers, the functional diversity of the floral offer had no overall effect on flower visitors. Finally, wild insect flower visitors peaked in the wet season when the floral density of spontaneous plants was lowest, limiting gardens’ support when demand was highest. Our results emphasise the importance of garden management in shaping flower visitor assemblages and resource use.