DOI: 10.5061/dryad.jsxksn0h5
title: Artificial flowers as a tool for investigating multimodal flower choice in wild insects

description: Flowers come in a variety of colours, shapes, sizes, and odours. Flowers
 also differ in the quality and quantity of nutritional rewards they
 provide to entice potential pollinators to visit. Given this diversity,
 generalist flower-visiting insects face the considerable challenge of
 deciding which flowers to feed on and which to ignore. Working with real
 flowers poses logistical challenges due to correlations between flower
 traits, maintenance costs, and uncontrolled variables. Here we overcome
 this challenge by designing multi-modal artificial flowers that varied in
 visual, olfactory, and reward attributes. We used artificial flowers to
 investigate the impact of seven floral attributes (three visual cues, two
 olfactory cues, and two rewarding attributes) on flower visitation and
 species richness. We investigated how flower attributes influenced two
 phases of the decision-making process: the decision to land on a flower,
 and the decision to feed on a flower. Artificial flowers attracted 890
 individual insects representing 15 morphospecies spanning seven arthropod
 orders. Honeybees were the most common visitors accounting for 46% of
 visitors. Higher visitation rates were driven by the presence of nectar,
 the presence of linalool, flower shape, and flower colour, and was
 negatively impacted by the presence of citral. Species richness was driven
 by the presence of nectar, the presence of linalool, and flower colour.
 For hymenopterans, the probability of landing the artificial flowers was
 influenced by the presence of nectar or pollen, shape, and the presence of
 citral and/or linalool. The probability of feeding increased when flowers
 contained nectar. For dipterans, the probability of landing on artificial
 flowers increased when the flower was yellow and contained linalool. The
 probability of feeding increased when flowers contained pollen, nectar,
 and linalool. Our results demonstrate the multi-attribute nature of flower
 preferences and highlight the usefulness of artificial flowers as tools
 for studying flower visitation in wild insects.
description: We developed and tested artificial flowers aimed at attracting
 wild, free-flying insects. Based on preliminary literature searches and
 our experience, we tested the effect of seven flower attributes: the
 presence of nectar, the presence of pollen, the presence of citral, the
 presence of linalool, flower colour, flower shape, and flower size. Each
 attribute had two levels, with the exception of ‘flower shape’ which had 4
 levels. For nectar, pollen, citral, and linalool, the levels were simply
 ‘presence’ or ‘absence’. For shape, the levels were daisy, daisy
 clustered, simple disc, and simple clustered. For colour, the levels were
 ‘yellow’ or ‘blue.’ For ‘display size’, the levels were ‘small’ (5 cm
 across) and ‘large’ (10 cm across). Investigating every combination of our
 seven attributes in a full factorial design was logistically infeasible as
 it would have required 256 unique flower treatments. To overcome this
 challenge, we used a fractional factorial experimental design to reduce
 the number of treatments to a feasible subset of 16 unique flower
 designs  We deployed patches of artificial flowers
 around The University of Sydney Camperdown campus in New South Wales,
 Australia (33.8886°S, 151.1873°E) on the unceded land of the Gadigal
 people of the Eora nation, between 10:00 and 11:00 am during Australian
 autumn (March–May) and early winter (June – August) 2021. We tested
 artificial flowers on days forecast to be sunny with no rain. Maximum
 temperatures on study days ranged from 18 to 31˚C. Experiments ran between
 10:00 and 16:00 hours. Insects were identified to
 morphospecies on the wing.
description: # Artificial flowers as a tool for investigating multimodal flower choice
 in wild insects
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jsxksn0h5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jsxksn0h5) This dataset includes: * A CSV containing data on visitation rates to artificial flowers "artificial\_flower\_data.csv" and corresponding metadata "art\_flowers\_metadata.csv" * A CSV containing data on insect approaches, landing and feeding on artificial flowers "multinom\_visitation.csv" and corresponding metadata "multinom\_visitation\_metadata.csv" * The file "artificial\_flower\_2023\_dryad\_v2" contains an R markdown file with the statistical analyses performed in the manuscript ## Description of the data and file structure Data were collected by observing insect interactions with multiattribute artificial flowers. The "artificial\_flower\_data.csv" contains observations of insects landing and feeding on flowers. Each row is an observation. The following data are included: | variable | description | | -------- | ----------- | | date | date experiment conducted | | pollen | Feedbee substitute present (y/n) | | nectar | n= not present,y= present | | shape | daisy, daisy\_vert, disc, disc\_vert | | colour | yellow, blue | | size | large, small | | linalool | n= not present,y= present | | citral | n= not present,y= present | | site | site id number | | insect\_abundance | number of insects that approached, landed or fed | | species\_richness | total number of spcies that approached, landed fed | | honey\_bee | number of Apis | | tetragonula | Num Tcarb | | no\_hb | Abundance excluding honeybees | | hoverfly | Syrphids | | feed | The number of insects that fed on flowers | | land | The number that landed, but did not feed | | approach | The number of insects that approached, but did not land or feed | | feed\_land | The number of insects that fed and/or landed | | spec\_rich\_land | Number of taxa that landed or fed | | observer | Who recorded info | | treatment\_real | Unique flower identifier | | food\_cat | nn= no pollen, no nectar, ny= no pollen, has nectar, yn =has pollen, no nectar, nn= no pollen, no nectar | | smell\_cat | nn= no odours, yy = linalool and citral, yn= linaloom, no citral, ny = no libalool, has citral | The file "multinom\_visitation.csv" contains data on insect interactions with artificial flowers where the interactions are defined as 'approach', 'land', or 'feed'. It contains the following data: | variable | description | | -------- | ----------- | | date | date experiment conducted | | pollen | Feedbee substitute present (y/n) | | nectar | n= not present,y= present | | shape | daisy, daisy\_vert, disc, disc\_vert | | colour | yellow, blue | | size | large, small | | linalool | n= not present,y= present | | citral | n= not present,y= present | | insect | initial categorisation from datasheets | | response | Described behaviour of the insect toward the flower as either Landing, Feeding or Approach. See manuscript for precise definition | | observer | Initials of the observer (f or k) | | treatmen\_real | Unique flower identifier | | num | ignore-used to make id\_numbers | | id\_num | unique id\_number for each observation; was calculated for an IRT analysis that we ended up not using | | morphoptaxa | morphotaxa | | order | Arthropod order the organism belongs to |