July 17, 2016
Plants can maximise their chances
of reproduction by taking advantage of how insects move between flowers when
they track down nectar, a study suggests.
In one of the first studies of
its type, scientists found
that the way in which plants arrange
their flowers affects the flight patterns taken by foraging bees.
Researchers expect that this
likely has an impact for how plants reproduce, and they suggest that plants
have evolved over time to take advantage of it.
Scientists already knew that
variation in shape, size and colour of individual flowers can influence how
their pollen is spread by visiting insects or birds. They were interested to learn
how the arrangement of flowers - such as circled around the stem or in a line -
affects pollination.
Scientists from the University of
Edinburgh and the University of Calgary, Canada, studied the flights of bmble bees as
they collected nectar from wild tall larkspur flowers in Alberta, Canada.
They found that when the plants'
flowers were present on only one side of the stem, bees would more often fly
vertically between flowers. By comparison, when a plant had flowers all around
its stem, bees would be less likely to fly upwards.
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