In a gaggle of plants known for trapping their pollinators in death traps, one species offers its flowers as nurseries in return. The Kobe University discovery blurs the road between mutualism and parasitism and sheds light on the evolution of complex plant-insect interactions.
Many plants depend on animals for pollination and most offer rewards for service. However, some plants cheat on their pollinators, and a famous example is the genus “It is famous as the only plant that achieves pollination at the cost of the pollinator's life,” says Kobe University biologist SUETSUGU Kenji, an authority on plant pollination ecology. The plant uses a musky odor to draw fungus gnats, which normally lay their eggs on the mushroom in its cup-shaped flowers. Insects can escape from male flowers, but only after temptations that end in them being covered in pollen. However, there is no such thing as a escape from female flowers. Once they enter them, the unwanted pollen carriers struggle to get out, which ensures that they are going to pollinate the flower, but they can't cling to the waxy interior and perish. change into
Suetsugu's group “has a long-standing interest in the genus, but we are also dedicated to challenging conventional ideas in pollination biology. This has prompted us to look beyond apparent antagonistic relationships and design experiments that are more nuanced interactions. can reveal.” They collected female and male flowers of a specific species, and watched each closely to see what insects were trapped and what happened to the flowers after pollination.
The surprising results have now been published within the journal The Kobe University team found that the most important pollinator, a fungus gnat, lays its eggs within the flowers and that the larvae feed on the decaying flowers, which turn into adult fungus gnats that emerge after a number of weeks. Additionally, they generally found mosquitoes emerging from flowers without the bodies of members of the species. This suggests that at the least some insects are literally capable of escape the trap. Suetsugu explains, “This discovery adds a new dimension to our knowledge of plant-insect interactions, but the most exciting aspect is that even in well-studied fields, there is still much to be learned. Nature is full of surprises!”
Suetsugu further explains, “The interaction between a plant and an insect is probably still different from other common examples of nursery mutualisms.” Fungus grunts should not dependable only as nurseries, so people who change into permanently trapped in a flower miss out on further opportunities to put eggs elsewhere. Thus, interaction probably still comes at a value to insects, but there's a facet of mutualism that is just not present in other members of the genus. “We suggest that this interaction likely represents an intermediate stage in the evolution of nursery pollination mutualism,” says the Kobe University biologist.
Thus, cheating to reciprocity could also be an example of a phenomenological evolutionary process. However, the research team hypothesized that by looking more closely at other members of the genus, similar interactions should be found. Suetsugu says that his team's result due to this fact “highlights the need to improve existing models of pollination biology beyond traditional mutualistic or illusory models, thereby providing more insight into the dynamics of plant pollination.” It helps in understanding.”