DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sqv9s4n32
title: Plant species with the trait of continuous flowering do not hold core roles in a Neotropical lowland plant-pollinating insect network

description: Plant-animal interaction science repeatedly finds that plant species
 differ by orders of magnitude in the number of interactions they support.
 The identification of plant species that play key structural roles in
 plant-animal networks is a global conservation priority, however, in
 hyperdiverse systems such as tropical forests, empirical datasets are
 scarce. Plant species with longer reproductive seasons are posited to
 support more interactions compared to plant species with shorter
 reproductive seasons but this hypothesis has not been evaluated for plant
 species with the longest reproductive season possible at the individual
 plant level, the continuous flowering phenology. Resource predictability
 is also associated with promoting specialization, and therefore continuous
 flowering may instead favor specialist interactions. Here we use
 quantitative pollinating insect-plant networks constructed from
 countryside habitat of the Tropical Wet forest Life Zone and modularity
 analysis to test if species that share the trait of continuous flowering
 hold core roles in mutualistic networks. With a few exceptions, most plant
 species sampled within our network were assigned to the role of
 peripheral. All but one network had significantly high modularity scores
 and each continuous flowering plant species was in a different module. Our
 work reveals that the continuous flowering plant species differed in some
 networks in their topological role, and that more evidence was found for
 the phenology to support specialized subsets of interactions. Our findings
 suggest that the conservation of Neotropical pollinating insect
 communities may require planting species from each module rather than
 identifying and conserving network hubs.
description: This study took place in the southern Pacific lowlands of the
 Puntarenas Province of Costa Rica in the Osa Peninsula. We selected 8
 sampling locations where we identified plant species that exhibit a
 continuous flowering phenology. A total of six plant species with this
 phenology were found through the study area. Since we were particularly
 interested in evaluating species topological roles and were including
 plant species with extended phenologies, we aimed to increase our
 resolution of within season interactions by (1) observing each plant
 individual for a 30-minute observation period, (2) conducting repeated
 sampling at all sampling locations within a season and (3) sampling across
 eight sampling locations throughout the Osa Peninsula that had similar
 plant species compositions, habitat types, and surrounding land use types
 (see Study Sites and Pollinator Sampling section from Hinton and Peters
 2021). We focused on collecting bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidae) and
 butterflies (Lepidoptera), since they were the primary flower visitors.
 Collected Lepidoptera were taken to the UGA field station in NW Costa Rica
 and were identified to species or genus by J. Montero and using the guides
 (DeVries 1987, Glassberg 2018). Bees were preserved in 70% ethanol and
 were exported to Eastern Kentucky University where they were identified to
 species, genus or morphospecies using several keys: Michener (2000),
 Mawdsley (2017), Aguiar and Melo (2011), and Roubik and Hanson (2004).
 Centridini and Ceratinini bee species were identified using reference
 collections established by J. Pawelek and Dr. S. Rehan,
 respectively.