The Dense and Highly Connected World of Greenland’s Plants and Their Pollinators

AbstractA pollination network of 26 pollinator species interacting with 17 plant species from the small Greenlandic island Uummannaq was analyzed for multiple parameters values. Of the insects collected, 77% of all individuals and 77% of all species belonged to Diptera. The ratio of pollinators to plant species was 1.5, which is lower than in other Arctic pollination networks. This might be a double-island effect as Uummannaq is a small island next to Greenland. Connectance was 14.3%, and linkage level of pollinator and plant species averaged 2.4 and 3.7 species links, respectively. The characteristic path length and average clustering coefficient of the 1-mode networks were 1.4 and 0.83, respectively, for the pollinator species and 1.3 and 0.79, respectively, for the plant species. For both pollinator species and plant species, the tail of the degree distribution had the best fit to an exponential model, indicating that the most connected species was constrained in their linking. However, the extremely short path length and high clustering indicated that the networks had small-world behavior, meaning that any disturbance is spread very fast to the entire network and that the networks are error tolerant but vulnerable to attack on the most linked species.