ASSOCIATION OF FLORAL CHARACTERS OF RESTINGA SPECIES WITH THE SELECTION OF FORAGING SITES BY PREDATORS SPIDERS OF FLORAL VISITORS

Abstract

Interactions between plants and animals are quite diverse and play an important role in maintaining plant biodiversity, and can be mutualistic, such as pollination and seed dispersal, or antagonistic, such as herbivory, florivory and nectar theft. Plants can also interact with the third trophic level, where predators, such as spiders, use flowers as a foraging site. Spiders that hunt in flowers can have beneficial effects, when feeding on floral antagonists, or negative effects, when feeding on mutualists, so understanding the aspects that attract these spiders to flowers can indicate the effects that the presence of these predators can have in the reproductive dynamics of plant species and how these effects influence the ecological role that plants play in maintaining ecosystems. Therefore, this study aims to list the plants in a restinga area that contain spiders and describe their floral characteristics. This study was carried out in a restinga area, where free walks were carried out looking for flowers that contained spiders, where the plants and spiders were collected for identification. Furthermore, floral characters, such as color, pollination unit, floral morphology and symmetry and resource offered were analyzed for each of the plant species. 19 spiders were collected from 14 plant species, which mostly had pink flowers, arranged in inflorescences, with rotated morphology and actinomorphic symmetry, offering nectar. These characteristics are associated with greater attraction and diversity of floral visitors, favoring hunting by spiders. Therefore, understanding the properties that influence spiders in choosing flowers as a foraging site can help in understanding the factors that interfere in the reproductive dynamics of plant species.