From left: Tim Hall, Tshegofatso Mathabe who assisted Saness Moodley by catching pollinators and identifying plant species.
Last week saw the return of Saness Moodley, together with two other students, to continue with her research. She is studying the relationship between pollinators and mountain grassland plants for her Ph.D. Her focus is, among others, on their interactions and how it contribute to forming a grassland community. Saness has to visit several grassland areas on the reserve at different times of the year to assess co-flowering communities. It means long hours trekking through the veld to new localities and also revisiting old ones for comparisons.
She observed that they have now found double the number of flowering species in early summer as compared to late summer and that species diversity eventually levels off no matter how many sites they visited. “We found mostly butterflies and long tongued flies visiting the flowers,” she added. She was supported with the practical part of her experiments by fellow students, Tim Hall, who is now completing his M.Sc in botany, and Tshegofatso Mathabe, who has just completed her H.Sc in botany. Like Saness, both are from Wits University’s School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences.
We have posted more detailed information about her work in the following blog post: https://www.mountainlands.co.za/about-pollinators-and-plants/
