A lot of Hawaii’s plants are in trouble. A new study by Clare Aslan and colleagues says over a third are threatened or endangered. Why are they suffering? The authors decided to look at pollination. Has something...
Author - Fi Gennu
Fi Gennu
Does a supergeneralist plant locally specialize on the most effective pollinators?
Umbellifers, a plant family that includes carrots, have striking inflorescences on stalks. Botanists have thought umbellifers have been generalists. They attract many different types of insect to their flowers. But is...
Alex Assiry
A change in pollinator alone does not explain speciation
How do plant species diverge? The Grant-Stebbin model describes pollinator-driven speciation. The idea is that plants adapt their flowers to work with the mosr effective pollinators in an area. When there are different...
How can sterility make a plant more fertile?
Brian Park and colleagues have been examining a peculiar fact. A plant can increase its reproductive success by producing sterile flowers. Not all the flowers are sterile. Viburnum lantanoides, (Adoxaceae) has enlarged...
Pollination quantity and purity
If you share a pollinator with another plant species in your location, is it a good idea to flower at the same time? You can only use pollen from another plant in the same species. If a bee arrives loaded with another...
How do pollinators paint the landscape with colour?
When you look at a patch of flowers, you often see clusters of colour. Even when a single species can have many different colours, you get patches. Why? How does a plant know to grow with this colour and not that colour...
Where does scent go when attraction doesn’t matter?
Scent matters. If you’re a flowering plant, scent is an important tool for attracting pollinators. It’s no surprise that botanists see it as a vital feature when studying pollination. But what happens when...
Wassailing to wake the trees
January 17 marks twelfth night in the Julian Calendar. It also marks the traditional night of wassailing, a ritual to drive evil spirits from the orchard.
Botanists see the start of tropicalisation
With climate change, plants start colonising new areas, but how will new regions become tropical? A new study hints at the start of the process.
Plant growth promotion by bacterial volatiles
We know that plants produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for a variety of reasons. One obvious example is a perfume to attract pollinators, but they’re also used for signalling in plants. However, not every...
