📝 The Purple Mistress That Lives Two Lives Each Year 🧵 https://doi.org/n278 A Mediterranean wildflower shapeshifts between seasons. Why would it stop trying to attract the pollinators it desired earlier in the year? #Botany #PlantScience 🧪 #InBrief - ThreadSky

botany.one • 57 days ago

📝 The Purple Mistress That Lives Two Lives Each Year 🧵
https://doi.org/n278

A Mediterranean wildflower shapeshifts between seasons. Why would it stop trying to attract the pollinators it desired earlier in the year?
#Botany #PlantScience 🧪 #InBrief

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botany.one•57 days ago

What’s the best way to attract pollinators, if you’re a plant? Should you aim for a specialist partner, who has a close connection to your flowers, or should you be a generalist and attract many pollinators, so you’re not in trouble if your favoured pollinator disappears?

botany.one•57 days ago

Moricandia arvensis, the Purple Mistress of the Mediterranean has it both ways, producing a different flower for spring and summer.

Spring is all about impact, with large, purple, cross-shaped flowers. These attract specialised long-tongue bees. Yet when the summer comes things change dramatically.

botany.one•57 days ago

The flowers are small and white and welcome a wide variety of insects. The change isn’t simply cosmetic. Spring flowers produce three times more nectar than their summer versions. It’s like the flower is plant from being an elite club to an open house.

botany.one•57 days ago

Gómez and colleagues wanted to know how this strategy and the pollinators it attracted affected Moricandia arvensis’s reproductive success. They observed flower visitors at six different sites in Spain over an eight year period. This meant recording over 6700 visits to the plants.

botany.one•57 days ago

They also tracked the effectiveness of the pollinators. Over eight hundred virgin flowers were exposed to insects belonging to 13 pollinator functional groups. Once the flower was visited, Gómez and colleagues ripped off the petals, to prevent further visits,

botany.one•57 days ago

marked who had visited the flower, and came back to see how effective the seed set was.

The spring flowers had a clear champion, long-tongued bees produced over three quarters of the seeds, and a further 11% came from beeflies. But the results from summer flowers were much more mixed,

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