The first year of data collection has come to an end, with the PhD students César Arvelos, Andrea Errante, Lalaina Ramiliarisona and Tsito Randriatsitohaina having spent six months in the rainforests to study Melastomataceae reproductive biology. They were joined by highly movtivated field assistants and together were able to ammass an incredible dataset, covering 100 species of Melastomataceae across more than 20 genera and 12 distinct tribes. Some tribes, like Melastomateae, Miconieae and Sonerileae are represented by many species across different elevation zones in the elevational gradients! The fieldwork teams could document several novel instances of pollinator shifts in Melastomataceae, encompassing different diurnal bird and nocturnal rodent and bat pollinators! They could also document different cases of generalist insect pollination and record bee vibrations for a large diversity of different bee species visiting the whole breadth of flower morphological diversity of Melastomataceae. Currently, we are working our way through more than 10TB of pollinator video recording data, extracting sound files to characterize bee vibrational properties, identifying bee and plant taxa, counting pollen grains (from many thousands of flowers collected in Eppendorf tubes) and preparing for DNA extractions of bees and plants. Several of the plant species we found during fieldwork are new to science, and the same likely holds true for some of the bee species! Detailed species descriptions will thus also form part of our work in the next years.

While this first field season has come to an end and much of the collected samples still await processing, new field teams are forming to start data collection for the second field season. The second field season is inteded to fill small gaps in the year 1 dataset, allow digging deeper in some unresolved cases (specifically regarding the mating systems of some Melastomataceae) and implement more risky (but very fun!) pollination experiments! Updates on the next fieldtrips will follow! (photo credit: César Arvelos)