With explosive bursts of pollen, male Hypenea macrantha flowers knock some competitors’ deposits off hummingbird beaks before the birds reach females.
. If a male flower can send a hummingbird away with more of its own pollen and less of its competitors’, it increases its chances of siring seeds in the next female flower the bird visits.is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet's changing climate.Fill out our surveyflowers have both male and female reproductive organs. To avoid mating with themselves, individual flowers go through a male phase and then a female phase.
To see if the projectile pollen blew away the competition, evolutionary ecologist Bruce Anderson and colleagues simulated hummingbird visits by poking a hummingbird skull into flowers. They marked pollen with tiny fluorescent particles, then applied the fluorescent pollen to the part of the beak where pollen tends to accumulate.
The hummingbird beaks lost twice as much fluorescent pollen when poked into explosive males versus when stuck inside inert, already-exploded flowers. Moreover, the more fluorescent pollen an explosion removed, the more successful that explosion was at depositing the flower’s own pollen onto the beak. High-speed video showed that pollen grains from exploding flowers functioned like missiles to knock existing pollen away.
“It’s almost like there’s a division of labor for pollen. Some of it is meant for mating, and some of it’s meant for fighting,” says Anderson, of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. More research is needed, he says, to find out whether the pollen blasts result in more offspring for male flowers.). For example, many animal penises have elaborate shapes for scooping sperm out of females’ reproductive tracts.
“Plants are not just stationary objects,” says Burch, of the State University of New York at Oswego. “They engage in communication, competition and now active reproductive sabotage of other plants.”
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