Lalaina and Tsito from our Madagascar MountBuzz team had just finished their first year of data collection in December 2025, when starting to make plans to go back to the field in February 2026. The reason was that during the October-December fieldwork, while highly successful for finding certain genera such as Medinilla in flower, few species of the genus Gravesia flowered, and especially few at the lowest elevations. Because we need assessments of plant-pollinator interactions across the entire elevational gradient, capturing the low elevation species is equally important as capturing the high elevation species. For this reason, Lalaina and Tsito went back to the field for another month and conducted a highly successful fieldtrip, finishing pollinator observations at low elevations, with many different bee species visiting the available Gravesia flowers! They further had a chance to monitor flower and fruiting phenology, adding to the dataset collected last year, and revealing exciting patterns of stacked flowering of different Melastomataceae genera. Hiking back up to the summit further allowed them to evaluate the results of the hand pollination treatments performed by Andrea and Gregor in 2025. Lalaina and Tsito are now busy reviewing the pollinator video data collected in 2025 and 2026 to estimate flower visitation rates, as well as working on bee identifications. If all goes well, they will visit the PAIn lab at the University of Vienna later in 2026 to work on pollen counting and complete datasets for their respective PhD projects on Medinilla and Gravesia.


