It's no surprise that a flower releases scent to attract a pollinator, but why would it do it hours before the pollinator is around? New research finds scent can have more than one job.
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...
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...
Pleasant or not, the fragrance of a flower typically serves as a sensory cue for pollinators, often indicative of some kind of reward, notably nectar. Floral scents are produced by specialised structures commonly...
Flowers emit a wide range of volatile compounds which can be critically important to interactions with pollinators or herbivores. Yet most studies of how the environment influences plant volatiles focus on leaf...
Some flowers only smell at day and some only at night, but how did they evolve these different rhythms? In our study, we investigate if populations of the same orchid species that are more pollinated either at day or at...
Reproductive traits important to coevolving interactions, such as the floral scent of L. bolanderi, may be more canalized than other traits important for plant fitness.
Floral scent is a key component of pollinator attraction and its chemistry modulates pollinator behavior and the formation of plant-pollinator networks. Neotropical Gongora orchids exhibit specialized pollinator...
Pollinator-driven speciation week continues, with Floral adaptation to local pollinator guilds in a terrestrial orchid, a paper by Sun, Gross and Schiestl. The star is the orchid Gymnadenia odoratissima, and orchid...
The conical epidermal cells found on the petals of most Angiosperm species are so widespread that they have been used as markers of petal identity, but their function has only been analysed in recent years. Whitney et...