[PCA] The Birds, the Bees, and the Mites - Moss pollinators?

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

Forwarding...

This is REALLY cool!  Who would of thought that mosses could be
"pollinated" so to speak.   Makes sense, though, in Desert conditions.  Be
sure to click on the video of sperm transfer.  It's amazing!

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/901/1

Teresa Prendusi, Regional Botanist
U.S. Forest Service, Intermountain Region
324 25th St., Ogden, UT  84401
Ph. (801) 625-5522
Fax (801) 625-5483
E-mail:  tprendusi at fs.fed.us


 
The Birds, the Bees, and the Mites
By Mary Beckman
ScienceNOW Daily News
1 September 2006
In the classic sex-ed story of the birds and the bees, insects flit from 
daisy to daisy, fertilizing girl blossoms with pollen rubbed off from boy 
buds. This activity has long been thought to have originated with plants 
that flower. But new research in today's issue of Science indicates that 
mites and other soil-dwelling arthropods, called springtails, ferry sperm 
from male to female mosses. 
Ferns and mosses use swimming sperm to procreate, and thus biologists had 
assumed they didn't need a pollinator's services. Yet these sperm can only 
swim a couple of centimeters before tuckering out, and botanists have long 
wondered how female plants can produce their version of 
seeds--sporophytes--with the closest guy 10 to 20 centimeters away. 
So botanist Nils Cronberg of Lund University in Sweden and colleagues 
embarked on a kind of moss Sex Ed 101 in the lab. They put male and female 
clusters of silver moss (Bryum argenteum Hedwig) on dishes coated with 
plaster of Paris to trap any sperm trying to making a run for it. The 
clusters were either allowed to touch or were placed 2 or 4 centimeters 
apart. Without mites or springtails, the females only made sporophytes 
when in contact with the males. When the animals had their run of the 
dishes for 20 hours, however, female plants produced offspring both 2 cm 
and 4 cm away. 
To determine whether the mites and springtails were just poking around or 
whether they visited the plants for a reason, the researchers compared how 
many bugs camped out on fertile plants versus sterile plants. At least 
fives times as many animals hunkered on the fertile plants than the barren 
ones. The researchers don't yet know whether the creatures get a reward 
for their work, much as bees get nectar. 
It's "a beautiful little experiment," says paleobotanist Peter Wilf of 
Pennsylvania State University in State College, who notes that the 
strategy gives mosses a way to propagate in dry places. Also, considering 
that mites, springtails, and mosses predate flowering plants by about 300 
million years, the results extend terrestrial plant-animal interactions 
"quite a bit" back in time, says bryologist Jon Shaw of Duke University in 
Durham, North Carolina. 
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