DOI: 10.5061/dryad.np5hqbzsh
title: Study of floral visitation on Leea asiatica

description: 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.
description: <b>Study
 species</b> <i>Leea</i> is a
 genus from the grape family Vitaceae which occurs throughout the old world
 tropics, from Africa to Asia, north eastern Australia, Islands of the
 pacific, but has diversified the most in Indomalayan region (J. E. Molina
 et al., 2013), with as many as 29 species in India Clarke (1881 as cited
 in (J. E. Molina et al., 2013).  <i>Leea asiatica,</i> the
 plant in this study grows up to 8m tall, and has greenish-white
 pentamerous flowers with a presence of 3-4mm long floral tube (Ridsdale C.
 E. 1974). The flowers are in conspicuous moderate to large corymbs, and
 are frequented by a variety of insects. <i>L. asiatica</i> is
 a generalist when it comes to visits by insects. (J. Molina, 2009)
 reporting up to 21 species on <i>Leea sps</i>, from over 4
 orders of Insects. <i>Leea asiatica </i>blooms from July end
 to mid-September. The field work was done during August due to heavy rain
 in July. <b>Study
 area</b>  The field work was conducted
 near Aarey Guesthouse (19.142910°; 72.881846°), from
 2<sup>nd</sup> August 2020 to 26<sup>th</sup>
 August 2020. Aarey forest is a part of the eco-sensitive zone of Sanjay
 Gandhi National Park, Mumbai. The forest is of mixed deciduous type,
 interspersed with disturbed landscapes and man-made grasslands. In the
 sampling area the forest was a mixture of mixed deciduous and some planted
 species. Aarey forest was chosen as the area to conduct the study because
 of its convenience during the COVID restrictions and the National parks
 were closed. <b>Observational
 methods</b> Plants, 1m on either side of a
 100m path were chosen based on their flowering status (Figure 1). From a
 total of 81 plants along the road data was collected from 13 of them. One
 plant per day was chosen for data collection, therefore there were 13
 observation days. Visitor activity on the plants
 was collected by means of video recording (Figure 2). Data was collected
 on 13 days from Aug 2<sup>nd</sup> to Aug
 26<sup>th</sup> 2020 (the bloom ended by this time). There
 were several days data couldn’t be because of heavy rain. The camera
 (Canon DSLR with 55 lens, Tripod), was focused on an inflorescence and
 recording was done from 8am to 2pm. Every hour of the observation period
 is represented by 30mins, therefore a total of 180mins of data was
 recorded for 6 hours every day. The data was recorded through-out light
 rain, but stopped when it rained heavily
description: The files arranged date wise are raw data for observational
 days.