ASCLEPOL - Pollinators of Periplocoideae, Secamonoideae and Asclepiadoideae
ASCLEPOL
From 10/1997 to 12/2030Staff: Sigrid Liede-Schumann, Ulrich Meve
ASCLEPOL is a compilation of pollinator records for the former family Asclepiadaceae (today subfamilies Asclepiadoideae, Periplocoideae and Secamonoideae of Apocynaceae). The project was originally conceived by Paul Forster (who due to work commitments has pulled out), Sigrid Liede and Jeff Ollerton (School of Environmental Science, Nene College, Northampton, GB) as a review of published information about pollination in the Asclepiadaceae. Our initial thought was that, other than for the well studied Asclepias, there is not a lot of information available on the pollinators of asclepiads. That proved not to be the case - there is quite a rich literature, but it's in obscure, usually old, journals and books, or secreted in the notebooks of field workers. Tracking down this information has taken some considerable time (we started in May 1994) and my feeling is that there is still much more to discover. As of December 1997 we have information about pollination in 160 species of asclepiads, in a range of genera in all tribes except Fockeeae (Table 1). We estimate that this represents about a 6% sample of the total number of species in the family. Since then, several records, especially for South American species, have been added.
Homepage: http://132.180.63.26/planta2/research/pollina/as_pol_t.html
List of publications of this Project
| Ollerton, J; Liede, S: The evolution of pollination systems in the Asclepiadaceae: a survey and preliminary analysis., Biol. J. Linn. Soc., 62, 593-610 (1997) |