'The Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service are working together to understand the importance of pollinators in the Arctic region. This article highlights the U.S. Department of the Interior's role in and commitment to pollinator conservation.  Without pollinators, humans and ecosystems cannot survive. June 24-30, 2007, has been designated National Pollinator Week by the U.S. Senate (S.Res. 580) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Find out what’s happening during National Pollinator Week in your area or post your event at www.pollinator.org. 

Arctic flora are the independent sort and are often thought of as not needing animal or insect pollinators. This idea is mainly based on two observations:

• Most arctic plants have the ability to reproduce clonally by rhizomes, bulbils or seeds that are genetically identical to the parent plants, and

• Cold, windy weather and short growing season limit the time insect pollinators can be active, making pollinator service unreliable.

Yet, while it holds true that most plants in the Arctic can produce seeds in the absence of pollinators, a significant fraction of plants rely entirely on insects for reproduction. Arctic willows, for example, have separate male and female plants that depend on insects, not wind, for pollination. Other common species such as the purple mountain saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia) and moss campion (Silene acaulis) require insect pollinators as well.

With so many cards stacked against them, how do flowering plants in the Arctic that rely on pollinators survive?

Additionally, the tremendous floral displays in dry arctic tundra (Fig. 1) are striking. If arctic plants don’t need pollinators, why are they investing so many resources into advertisement and rewards?

To gain insight into the pollination of arctic plants and to better understand how necessary insect pollinators are for the conservation at high latitudes, a small team of plant ecologists sought out a rare and a common primrose. Traveling to Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and adjacent Bureau of Land Management-administered lands, the group studied the pollination ecology of the globally rare Chukchi primrose (Fig. 2) and the closely related but common Arctic primrose.

BLM botanist Randy Meyers and NPS Western Arctic National Parklands Chief Tom Heinlein helped organize the study and provided logistical support. Steve Gisler, a volunteer botanist from Oregon Department of Transportation, assisted Dr. Matthew Carlson of the University of Alaska-Anchorage with hand pollinations and with collecting pollinators and plant specimens in late June of 2004 (Fig. 3.).

Carlson returned to the site in July with Dr. Justen Whittall of University of California-Davis and Dr. Tom Kaye of the Institute for Applied Ecology to observe and collect the results from hand pollinations and to gain insight into the population structure of the primroses.

They observed five pollinators visiting the primroses - three bumblebee species (Fig 4), a syrphid fly, and an empid fly; but visitation rates were quite low despite warm and still weather. A pollinator visited a patch of 1,000 primroses about once every two hours. Greater numbers of butterflies were observed visiting other plant species in July.

They discovered that the rare Chukchi primrose has an unusual reproductive system compared to other primroses. It is able to produce seeds through both self pollination and by pollination with insects. Most of the common arctic primroses are self pollinated. Additionally, the common species has more flowers and produces many more seeds than the rare primrose.   Since it doesn’t require numerous pollinators which have a hard time surviving arctic climates, it is more abundant with self pollination and is found more widely distributed. 

If both of these primroses have developed ways of surviving without pollinators, why do they produce relatively large flowers with nectar to attract pollinators?

Even though most arctic plants can persist and produce offspring without pollinators, mixing genes from other individuals has significant benefit. New and favorable gene combinations can be formed through the union of different individuals. Additionally, even though many arctic plants can persist through clonal growth, they initially require seeds. Also, the vigor of plants produced from clonal propagation declines over time. The fact that arctic pollinators are less common and forage less often likely forces flowering plants to compete more vigorously with one another, resulting in larger flowers with greater nectar and pollen rewards for the pollinators.

The ecologists came to this conclusion: Arctic pollinators may be less common and have less time to visit flowers than at lower latitudes. In response, arctic plants may have developed mechanisms to cope with that reduced availability. The rarity of pollinators, however, elevates their importance in facilitating gene exchange and in maintaining plant vigor.