A wicked, lying flower that looks like a rotten beetle
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Was they flipped the butterflies. Thomas Rupp, a doctoral student in ecology at the Paris-Lodron University in Salzburg, was walking through a mountain forest with his teammates when he saw them in Athens, Greece: when they have a caterpillar, they feed on a special type of insect. called the plant Aristolochia microstoma. “Everywhere I saw this butterfly fly,” says Rupp, “I knew there had to be some Aristolochia around the plants “.
Rupp bent down as the unusual flowers of the plant were hidden among the rocks and leaves. They are dark red merlots, and look like an inflated bulb attached to a narrow tube made up of a small pore called a stoma. The whole thing looks like the entrance to the intestinal tract. It is not. It’s even weirder.
Ecologists have long suspected that these flowers use a light trick to attract visitors, as they will carry pollen with them when they go to other flowers of the same species. Most flowers offer colorful petals or sweet nectar in exchange for this service. But no A. microstoma. “They’re lies,” says Stefan Dötterl Rupp’s adviser and environmentalist. “They promise something. They seem to offer a reward for what they do no they. So they turn pollinators into pollinators. “
The “misleading pollination” tactic is not heard, as are some orchids evolve similar to the mistakes that will try to associate their appearance and smell, and the most famous corpse flower it attracts insects that seek out rotten flesh. But in an investigation published in the magazine in May Limitations in ecology and evolution, the group found that these plants attract pollinators using another stench of death: the smell of dead beetles. This is the first report of plants that appear to be damaged invertebrates, and Rupp’s team shows how this unique evolutionary strategy works to catch unexpected flies.
It must be said that flies are also rare. Phoridae, a family of flies that includes “coffin flies,” are known to lay eggs on the bodies of rotten beetles. Foridos also make frequent human remains. They can be an indicator of where a body is buried, and scientists can use it to calculate how long a person has been dead. “People are important insects that people use for forensic entomology, and here they are visiting a flower that was thought to mimic corpses or remains,” he says. Anne Gaskett, an environmentalist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who was not involved in the work. Gasket examines how plants, especially orchids, deceive pollinators. “It’s a beautiful match of what you can anticipate and what you’ve really found.”
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