DOI: 10.25338/b8vh25
title: Data from: Flowers of a South African succulent plant predict tomorrow’s weather, synchronizing flower opening with pollinator activity

description: 1. Day-to-day synchrony between flower opening and pollinator activity is
 important for maximizing plant fitness. A succulent, Bulbine frutescens
 (L.) Willd., is an ideal model for studying synchrony in response to daily
 weather as it flowers year-round. Additionally, it has self-incompatible
 flowers that open for just one day, making it essential that flower
 opening matches pollinator activity. 2. Observations were made on urban
 plants in California, USA, with validation measurements in the native
 range in South Africa. Independent observations indicated that flowers
 open primarily after favorable conditions the previous day, specifically
 air temperatures above 15°C. Solar radiation was experimentally shown to
 have limited, but significant effects. Pollinators, mostly bee species,
 had similar temperature thresholds to flowers. 3. Developmental
 constraints on flowers were hypothesized to delay opening by a day. Flower
 bud growth was closely related to temperature, with warm days resulting in
 sufficient growth for buds to become competent to open the following day.
 Lab experiments demonstrated that competent flowers were suppressed from
 opening until at least 16 hours was accumulated in which temperatures were
 above 12°C; thus, on many cool days, sufficient development to cause
 flower opening would only occur a day after favorable weather. 4. Based
 upon regression models of pollinator and flower response to weather,
 fitness was estimated as a function of synchrony, over twenty years of
 weather from California and across the natural range in South Africa.
 Flowers responding to either the previous day’s or current day’s weather
 resulted in similar predicted fitness, with flower response to the current
 day’s weather leading to a slightly higher cost, i.e. flowers opened when
 pollinators would be absent. 5. Multiple temperature-responsive
 constraints on bud growth and development result in delays in flower
 opening, such that flower opening occurs the day after favorable weather.
 Given the high correlation between daily temperatures in the USA and South
 African winter-rainfall environments, behavior predicting the following
 day’s weather results in high fitness. Many pollinators share similar
 temperature thresholds for activity, thus diverse plants may have evolved
 predictive behavior maximizing daily synchrony between pollinators and
 flower opening.
description: Data were acquired through field observations, long-term
 monitoring of multiple populations of bulbine, as fully described in the
 methods for the published article in <em>Functional
 Ecology</em>. Each data file represents a different analysis or data
 used to create a figure. Each file contains initial rows that describe the
 dataset and nature of data in each column, followed by a row of column
 headings and then the data.
description: Files are stored as spreadsheets in open-source comma separated
 ".csv" format, and can be opened by a broad range of software,
 including Excel.