[PCA] Why Are Bat Flowers Oversexed?

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

This article came over the pollinator listserve. Enjoy!


Why Are Bat Flowers Oversexed? 
from ScienceNOW Daily News 

Flowers pollinated by bats have a bit of a reputation. Their male sex 
organs are especially big. And they "produce a ton of pollen" compared 
with other flowers, says biologist Nathan Muchhala of the University 
of Toronto in Canada. They need to, ecologists had assumed, because 
bats are sloppy pollinators. But a new study suggests the opposite: 
Bats are so good, it pays to pile on the pollen. 

Bats pollinate a few hundred species of plants in the New World. Most 
of these plants evolved from ancestors pollinated by hummingbirds. As 
part of that evolution, the plants traded gaily colored daytime 
flowers for dull evening blooms. The flowers visited by bats also 
produce about seven times more pollen than flowers catering to 
hummingbirds, but that increase has been hard to explain. 

One hypothesis has been that bats are just not very efficient 
pollinators: Perhaps they waste much of the pollen they pick up during 
their nectar runs by eating it or by grooming. But Muchhala, a postdoc 
in the lab of pollination biologist James Thomson, thought it was the 
hummingbirds that looked wasteful.

Full story: 
http://ow.ly/1HHnd 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/native-plants_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20100514/5a2a15bf/attachment.html>