Thanks. The first article has more info, e.g. that those beetles are flightless.
But that makes me suspect that they spend a lot of time on one tree, only pollinating that tree, which would be pointless because there is no exchange of genes.
> To minimize the risk of self-pollination, which can result in inbreeding depression and recessive mutations, the flowers open in the morning and the stigmas are receptive to pollen that is brought to them by foraging beetles throughout the day. When evening comes, the innermost tepals close around the carpel and trap the pollinating beetle. While the tepals are closed, the beetle deposits pollen all over the receptive stigmas. The stigmas then close and the anthers become active, covering the same beetle in fresh pollen so that when the sepals open in the morning, it will fly out and find another flower to pollinate. This precise delay in flower function helps to ensure cross pollination.
That reminds me that people who hear the word for butterfly (Schmetterling) in German for the first time usually think it sounds extremely violent. Ok, then again, "butterfly" sounds slightly disgusting if you think about it. But TIL that they actually have a similar root: the "Schmetter-" doesn't come from smashing, but from "Schmetten", a word derived from the Slavic "smetana" (cream). Apparently butterflies got their name from the popular belief that witches could turn into butterflies to steal milk or cream (and probably also other dairy products?).
I have to say that if we're also talking about wild grasses, my wire fox terrier is also a pollinator. He collects an incredible amount of seeds and burrs during his walkies investigations and I have to pick them out of his fur afterwards (risky because he gets annoyed easily).
My grandpappy told me that if you want a good crop of pawpaws you have to hang a dead cat in the tree. I think dead cats were in greater supply back in his day.
Fascinating flowers for a tree though. Red meat color and odor only a fly could love.
Yeah I've wondered about just really nasty ass stinky fresh manure around the base of each tree. That would attract flies.
Probably a flush of nitrogen at exactly the wrong time tho. Most plants respond to that by pushing excess green growth instead of flowering and fruit set.
The farm next door occasionally grows cauliflower. Like 15 acres of it. When that happens and they do the harvest in the end of August the whole area stinks like rotting brassicas and there's flies everywhere. If I could just replicate that experience in mid-May...
they are interesting plants, not many people cultivate them though, what do you do with the fruit? I hear it spoils fast and is not very marketable because of its lack of shelf life.
edit: Just saw your reply to the other guy, actually I'm in Ontario, any chance I can get a fruit or two :) ? I've been wanting to try it
Yeah, you can't really sell it in market as it bruises easily and spoils quickly.
We're in our 7th or 8th year on these trees and only get a dozen or so fruits despite it being quite a few trees. Last year we got none because of heavy rains during pollination time. I've planted more but it will take another 5 years before they do anything.
There are people on FB marketplace who offer them around October when they ripen, keep an eye out.
I will try to check later in the year! I planted a few of my own actually, but considering they are still saplings, it will take some time before i get any fruit myself. I also managed to find some at a park nearby, but I don't think those are producing anything either.
If they're not grafted varieties, it can take 10 years to get any fruit at all. And it's recommended to get multiple different types for pollination to be more successful.
Email me and I can connect you with some. There is a FB group for folks growing them in the NYC area, plus a list of all the parks where they are planted.
The earliest angiosperms appeared in the Cretaceous. This is after the appearance of Hymenoptera (Jurassic) and Diptera (Triassic). While a nice story, this needs additional substantiation. An alternative explanation is likelier imo.
The early Hymenoptera were predatory, like wasps still are.
Bees, which feed on pollen and nectar from plant flowers, instead of catching other insects, have evolved much later from wasp-like Hymenoptera, after angiosperms were already widespread.
From your link, the bees are nested within Crabronidae, most of which are predatory wasps, e.g. the beewolves.
So there is no doubt that the immediate ancestors of bees were predatory, like also their more distant ancestors that they share with ants and other kinds of wasps.
Hymenoptera has split early into two branches, one leading to wasps and the other to sawflies.
Most sawflies, as you say, feed on plants. So the question is what kind of food was used by the common ancestor of all Hymenoptera, given that from that ancestor there are two descendant groups, one predatory and one phytophagous (plant-eating).
There is no certain evidence for this, but there are arguments that it is much more likely that the common ancestor was predatory and the sawflies have evolved from that into plant-eating insects.
There are two arguments for this. One is that eating plants is more difficult for animals and all plant-eating animals had to develop special abilities in order to digest plants. Because of this there are a lot of examples among animal groups where the ancestors of a group were predatory, and only some of their descendants have succeeded to transition to feeding on plants.
There are much fewer examples of plant-eating animals that have become predatory again, because once some animals become able to eat plants, they normally have access to a much more abundant source of food than the predatory animals, so reverting to a predatory lifestyle would be disadvantageous. Humans are one of the few exceptions, because their ability to throw weapons at a distance has allowed them to become extremely successful hunters.
The second argument is that Hymenoptera form one of the two branches of Holometabola, the insects with complete metamorphosis. For the orders of insects that belong to the other branch of Holometabola, e.g. for beetles, wherever there is reasonable certainty about the lifestyle of the ancestors, they were also predatory, so it is more likely that the common ancestor of all Holometabola was also predatory.
The giant arum is another example of beetle pollinated flowers. It smells of manure so attracts manure-loving beetles.
With more traditional pollinators, I've always found that a fascinating example of bee pollination that does not involve the plant taking advantage of the insect drinking its nectar is Ophrys Apifera, which has a distinct bee-shape silhouette and relies on the mating instincts of male bees in order to pollinate.
If it becomes a problem I would imagine that most victim plants will evolve certain defence mechanisms. For example, some insects will simply chew through flowers to reach the nectar stores - so I think in such cases a flower would just evolve a tougher skin, or secrete something that deters insects from doing that.
Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.
You mean honeybees? Because there are lots of other (wild) bee species that are very specialized. And they also contradict most of the other things we think we know about bees: they are usually solitary, and they rarely sting (honeybees only do that to protect the hive).
Maybe it's the other way around: humans selected honeybees to "domesticate" because of their versatility (and of course the fact that they produced honey)?
Around my location (southern brazil) there are hundreds of species of stingless bees, living in colonies. Many (most?) produce honey too. I don't dispute that there are also lots of solitary bees. Bees are wonderful and way more diverse than people usually think.
Restricting the word "insects" to hexapods is a modern convention that does not have any basis in etymology.
Aristotle used the word "insects" for all terrestrial arthropods and this was followed for millennia until the last two centuries when someone preferred to use "Insecta" instead of "Hexapoda", without giving any reason for this, and others followed this taxonomy.
Even so, the exact extent of the term "insects" varies between biologists, because some do not include all wingless hexapods under "insects".
In an informal discussion, I do not see any mistake in using the word "insects" with its original meaning from Aristotle, which is also the meaning that can be encountered in a lot of old books. For unambiguous animal classification, the word "hexapods" is preferable.
This is a discussion about animal intelligence. Jumping spiders have a different brain layout than bees, which are formally insects. Other insects are more like the bee than spiders.
So in this case, it matters that spiders are not in fact insects in the strict sense.
Obviously you can't give them an IQ test but all the data I've seen (and I am no expert here) shows they are possible the smartest arthropod out there. There are of course different species of jumping spider so mileage may vary.
Thanks, I never thought about bees like that. They certainly can use many types of flowers, as evidenced by various sorts of honey. Nitpick: some spiders are pretty darn intelligent and even seem to dream when they sleep, apparently.
Note there are various species who're oligolectic meaning they only collect pollen and nectar - and hence pollinate only - a single family or sometimes even single species of plants. Moreover they are usually also better at pollinating than more generalistic species especially honeybees.
Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?
My magnolia is the only thing that seems to attract honeybees, which I rarely see otherwise. The article doesn't seem to justify the "not bees" part, though. I'd imagine bees can pollinate them too.
Magnolia make one of my favorite smells on earth. We have a huge one in front of a house we have moved away from and back to many times. The intoxicating smell when I mow the leaves and seeds beneath it is something I want to keep forever. I collected the red seeds and put them in a bottle with alcohol and I go back and smell it often to remember. The house flooded four days before closing on selling it, so we got more time with the house. We are wrapping that up and we will say goodbye to that old house, and it’s now quite huge magnolia in the front. I never knew the flowers were pollinated by beetles or why the scent smelled like that. I collected seeds last year and cold stratified a bunch all winter in our fridge. I planted them this spring and 7 survived the process and are now growing in red cups in my new house.
Mountain mints are also pollinated by beetles—and a bazillion other critters. They are extraordinary pollinator magnets. Beetles, bees, flies, wasps, mosquitos (!), moths, butterflies, ...
A recent study of just a few mountain mint species (https://doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2024.2411072) found that they attracted a crazy variety of pollinators. Check the supplementary materials for the full list.
Mosquitoes (which are flies) don’t really deserve the exclamation mark, given that the males of all mosquito species live exclusively on nectar, with the females (of most but not all species) augmenting their diet with animal protein in order to produce eggs.
The long, thin proboscis originally evolved for nectar drinking like in many other insects (and some birds!); its use for sucking animal blood was a later adaptation.
These are the original articles this re-heat was created from:
- https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/magnolias-be...
- https://gardens.si.edu/learn/blog/the-botany-of-magnolias/
Thanks. The first article has more info, e.g. that those beetles are flightless.
But that makes me suspect that they spend a lot of time on one tree, only pollinating that tree, which would be pointless because there is no exchange of genes.
The desperation of the immobile
The second article goes into more detail:
> To minimize the risk of self-pollination, which can result in inbreeding depression and recessive mutations, the flowers open in the morning and the stigmas are receptive to pollen that is brought to them by foraging beetles throughout the day. When evening comes, the innermost tepals close around the carpel and trap the pollinating beetle. While the tepals are closed, the beetle deposits pollen all over the receptive stigmas. The stigmas then close and the anthers become active, covering the same beetle in fresh pollen so that when the sepals open in the morning, it will fly out and find another flower to pollinate. This precise delay in flower function helps to ensure cross pollination.
A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators
One of those moths is this guy, who (in flight, not so much in still images) looks and sounds like a miniature hummingbird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-moth
I noticed these for the first time earlier this summer. Incredible insects! They really do give a hummingbird impression.
https://satwcomic.com/two-birds-in-the-hand
For many people, it is the other way around. It is very remarkable that there is a bird, which looks so much like a big version of this butterfly!
After all, in Europe these butterflies are commonplace, but I've never seen the American bird in my life.
rare instance where the German name Taubenschwänzchen ('little dove-tail') is nicer than the English name
That reminds me that people who hear the word for butterfly (Schmetterling) in German for the first time usually think it sounds extremely violent. Ok, then again, "butterfly" sounds slightly disgusting if you think about it. But TIL that they actually have a similar root: the "Schmetter-" doesn't come from smashing, but from "Schmetten", a word derived from the Slavic "smetana" (cream). Apparently butterflies got their name from the popular belief that witches could turn into butterflies to steal milk or cream (and probably also other dairy products?).
Never understood why they are called hummingbirds. They sound more like squeekingbirds to me.
Finding hawk moth caterpillars on my tomato plant was one of the bigger wtfs of my adult life
Honestly you're lucky there were any leaves left.
You must have caught it within two or three hours after its arrival.
In the US we have similar hawk moths; the tomato hornworm also looks like a hummingbird when it reaches maturity.
Once I started leaving just the ones with parasitoid wasp eggs on their backs in the garden, I completely stopped having problems with these guys.
The "hornworm" caterpillars leave amazing poops behind. They look like (not so) little green grenades.
Their moths are important pollinators of some nice native flowers.
When I noticed them they were covered in wasp pupae, so maybe that slowed them down.
I'm in the Eastern US, btw.
Very common around my mom's house.
mosquitoes too, though it pains me to give them credit for anything
True, all mosquitoes drink nectar, and only females of some species drink blood.
and some species' females require a blood meal before laying eggs :(
I have to say that if we're also talking about wild grasses, my wire fox terrier is also a pollinator. He collects an incredible amount of seeds and burrs during his walkies investigations and I have to pick them out of his fur afterwards (risky because he gets annoyed easily).
Seeds are not gametes. While your dog may help spread the seeds, they are not assisting in the sexual reproduction itself.
We've got a fly-pollinated bush in our yard. Smells like rotting death when it's wet to attract them. (I did not plant it...)
And... wolves?
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....
If you push me into a bush then you'll make me a pollinator as well
And by wind. The major staple crops are all wind pollinated.
And olive trees have genders, with the male pollinating the surrounding females.
That's pretty common in plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioecy
My pawpaws (Asimina triloba) mainly need (house) flies to pollinate. They make their flowers look like meat.
I have a couple 100 foot rows of them, it's tricky to get good pollination.
My grandpappy told me that if you want a good crop of pawpaws you have to hang a dead cat in the tree. I think dead cats were in greater supply back in his day.
Fascinating flowers for a tree though. Red meat color and odor only a fly could love.
For anyone that’s close, go to the upcoming Ohio Pawpaw festival! https://ohiopawpawfest.com/
Yeah I've wondered about just really nasty ass stinky fresh manure around the base of each tree. That would attract flies.
Probably a flush of nitrogen at exactly the wrong time tho. Most plants respond to that by pushing excess green growth instead of flowering and fruit set.
Solid cow manure is really low in nitrogen, though, and maybe 90% is organic N which is released slowly.
Maybe you meant fresher manure.
Whatever brings the most flies to the yard.
The farm next door occasionally grows cauliflower. Like 15 acres of it. When that happens and they do the harvest in the end of August the whole area stinks like rotting brassicas and there's flies everywhere. If I could just replicate that experience in mid-May...
they are interesting plants, not many people cultivate them though, what do you do with the fruit? I hear it spoils fast and is not very marketable because of its lack of shelf life.
edit: Just saw your reply to the other guy, actually I'm in Ontario, any chance I can get a fruit or two :) ? I've been wanting to try it
Yeah, you can't really sell it in market as it bruises easily and spoils quickly.
We're in our 7th or 8th year on these trees and only get a dozen or so fruits despite it being quite a few trees. Last year we got none because of heavy rains during pollination time. I've planted more but it will take another 5 years before they do anything.
There are people on FB marketplace who offer them around October when they ripen, keep an eye out.
I will try to check later in the year! I planted a few of my own actually, but considering they are still saplings, it will take some time before i get any fruit myself. I also managed to find some at a park nearby, but I don't think those are producing anything either.
If they're not grafted varieties, it can take 10 years to get any fruit at all. And it's recommended to get multiple different types for pollination to be more successful.
Recommended for Ontario: https://www.grimonut.com/ (NoTL area)
Bare root seedlings that you'd plant in the spring. Though it is not clear to me if what they're selling are grafted or not, I've never been 100%.
You grow these commercially? Always wondering where I can buy good quality ones when they're in season (in NYC area)
Email me and I can connect you with some. There is a FB group for folks growing them in the NYC area, plus a list of all the parks where they are planted.
No, from those trees we basically only get enough for personal consumption because fruit bearing (so far) is so unreliable.
Also, southern Ontario.
the little beetle that could, and pawpaw's are self-incompatible. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba#Pollination
plenty of sap beetles around here, but i don't tend to see them on my pawpaws. they come around later season when my raspberries ripen
would not rule out the cash crop farming on both sides of me from doing a number on the insects, though i seem to have plenty overall.
unfortunately an excessive number of japanese beetles
Ants as well
Yeah I was about to say ants with passion fruit flowers.
[dead]
The earliest angiosperms appeared in the Cretaceous. This is after the appearance of Hymenoptera (Jurassic) and Diptera (Triassic). While a nice story, this needs additional substantiation. An alternative explanation is likelier imo.
The early Hymenoptera were predatory, like wasps still are.
Bees, which feed on pollen and nectar from plant flowers, instead of catching other insects, have evolved much later from wasp-like Hymenoptera, after angiosperms were already widespread.
So the timeline fits into the story.
> were predatory ... ?
Were they? Sawflies are herbivores, and are at minimum share a common ancestor with those that were not herbivores.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
From your link, the bees are nested within Crabronidae, most of which are predatory wasps, e.g. the beewolves.
So there is no doubt that the immediate ancestors of bees were predatory, like also their more distant ancestors that they share with ants and other kinds of wasps.
Hymenoptera has split early into two branches, one leading to wasps and the other to sawflies.
Most sawflies, as you say, feed on plants. So the question is what kind of food was used by the common ancestor of all Hymenoptera, given that from that ancestor there are two descendant groups, one predatory and one phytophagous (plant-eating).
There is no certain evidence for this, but there are arguments that it is much more likely that the common ancestor was predatory and the sawflies have evolved from that into plant-eating insects.
There are two arguments for this. One is that eating plants is more difficult for animals and all plant-eating animals had to develop special abilities in order to digest plants. Because of this there are a lot of examples among animal groups where the ancestors of a group were predatory, and only some of their descendants have succeeded to transition to feeding on plants.
There are much fewer examples of plant-eating animals that have become predatory again, because once some animals become able to eat plants, they normally have access to a much more abundant source of food than the predatory animals, so reverting to a predatory lifestyle would be disadvantageous. Humans are one of the few exceptions, because their ability to throw weapons at a distance has allowed them to become extremely successful hunters.
The second argument is that Hymenoptera form one of the two branches of Holometabola, the insects with complete metamorphosis. For the orders of insects that belong to the other branch of Holometabola, e.g. for beetles, wherever there is reasonable certainty about the lifestyle of the ancestors, they were also predatory, so it is more likely that the common ancestor of all Holometabola was also predatory.
The giant arum is another example of beetle pollinated flowers. It smells of manure so attracts manure-loving beetles.
With more traditional pollinators, I've always found that a fascinating example of bee pollination that does not involve the plant taking advantage of the insect drinking its nectar is Ophrys Apifera, which has a distinct bee-shape silhouette and relies on the mating instincts of male bees in order to pollinate.
Interesting. I never thought worker bees retained any mating instincts.
AFAIK worker bees are female. Drones are male and don't actually gather any honey, but just go around looking for a queen to mate with.
Many bee species are solitary.
Some insects gather nectar from a flower and don't pollinate the flower. This is called nectar robbing.
See https://www.backyardecology.net/not-all-flower-visitors-are-...
What’s the best security control against this robbery?!
If it becomes a problem I would imagine that most victim plants will evolve certain defence mechanisms. For example, some insects will simply chew through flowers to reach the nectar stores - so I think in such cases a flower would just evolve a tougher skin, or secrete something that deters insects from doing that.
This is what the shape of the flower and its placement of the stamen and pistils are all about.
great idea... How do you make sure there is an exchange.
Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.
Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.
You mean honeybees? Because there are lots of other (wild) bee species that are very specialized. And they also contradict most of the other things we think we know about bees: they are usually solitary, and they rarely sting (honeybees only do that to protect the hive).
Maybe it's the other way around: humans selected honeybees to "domesticate" because of their versatility (and of course the fact that they produced honey)?
Around my location (southern brazil) there are hundreds of species of stingless bees, living in colonies. Many (most?) produce honey too. I don't dispute that there are also lots of solitary bees. Bees are wonderful and way more diverse than people usually think.
As is so often the case with biology on earth.
Jumping spiders are smarter
Spiders are not insects though https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...
Restricting the word "insects" to hexapods is a modern convention that does not have any basis in etymology.
Aristotle used the word "insects" for all terrestrial arthropods and this was followed for millennia until the last two centuries when someone preferred to use "Insecta" instead of "Hexapoda", without giving any reason for this, and others followed this taxonomy.
Even so, the exact extent of the term "insects" varies between biologists, because some do not include all wingless hexapods under "insects".
In an informal discussion, I do not see any mistake in using the word "insects" with its original meaning from Aristotle, which is also the meaning that can be encountered in a lot of old books. For unambiguous animal classification, the word "hexapods" is preferable.
> Restricting the word "insects" to hexapods is a modern convention that does not have any basis in etymology.
This is one of those very rare cases in which "entomology" or "etymology" might have been chosen without the intended meaning being clear. :)
This is a discussion about animal intelligence. Jumping spiders have a different brain layout than bees, which are formally insects. Other insects are more like the bee than spiders.
So in this case, it matters that spiders are not in fact insects in the strict sense.
This is explicitly a thread about arthropods, though.
Quote from above:
> they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod
But they are arthropods.
Are they? They are smarter than web-spinning spiders but I've never read anything suggesting they are smarter than bees.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3357
Obviously you can't give them an IQ test but all the data I've seen (and I am no expert here) shows they are possible the smartest arthropod out there. There are of course different species of jumping spider so mileage may vary.
That’s definitely the premise Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time haha
I've watched videos of them stalking prey and they seem extremely intelligent for their size. It's very impressive.
Bees' intelligence relies on them being a hive organism.
Thanks, I never thought about bees like that. They certainly can use many types of flowers, as evidenced by various sorts of honey. Nitpick: some spiders are pretty darn intelligent and even seem to dream when they sleep, apparently.
> They certainly can use many types of flowers
Note there are various species who're oligolectic meaning they only collect pollen and nectar - and hence pollinate only - a single family or sometimes even single species of plants. Moreover they are usually also better at pollinating than more generalistic species especially honeybees.
Now I am musing about spider nightmares.
Thousands of tiny humans crawling all over you...
Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?
There's a reason the average spider sleepwalks into 8 human mouths a year.
One spider, 8 mouths: what are they pollinating?
You really didn't have to share this.
My magnolia is the only thing that seems to attract honeybees, which I rarely see otherwise. The article doesn't seem to justify the "not bees" part, though. I'd imagine bees can pollinate them too.
You should plant clover. You'll get plenty of bees.
Lavender is what we see swarms and swarms of bees come grab in the Pacific Northwest.
Magnolia make one of my favorite smells on earth. We have a huge one in front of a house we have moved away from and back to many times. The intoxicating smell when I mow the leaves and seeds beneath it is something I want to keep forever. I collected the red seeds and put them in a bottle with alcohol and I go back and smell it often to remember. The house flooded four days before closing on selling it, so we got more time with the house. We are wrapping that up and we will say goodbye to that old house, and it’s now quite huge magnolia in the front. I never knew the flowers were pollinated by beetles or why the scent smelled like that. I collected seeds last year and cold stratified a bunch all winter in our fridge. I planted them this spring and 7 survived the process and are now growing in red cups in my new house.
https://imgur.com/a/OAHQCW4
Living fossils, like Ginkos
And Equisetum/Horsetail/Schachtelhalm
Mountain mints are also pollinated by beetles—and a bazillion other critters. They are extraordinary pollinator magnets. Beetles, bees, flies, wasps, mosquitos (!), moths, butterflies, ...
A recent study of just a few mountain mint species (https://doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2024.2411072) found that they attracted a crazy variety of pollinators. Check the supplementary materials for the full list.
Mosquitoes (which are flies) don’t really deserve the exclamation mark, given that the males of all mosquito species live exclusively on nectar, with the females (of most but not all species) augmenting their diet with animal protein in order to produce eggs.
The long, thin proboscis originally evolved for nectar drinking like in many other insects (and some birds!); its use for sucking animal blood was a later adaptation.
I have mountain mint growing in my yard and every pollinator imaginable goes to that plant.
I have slender mountain mint and it used to be a popular pollinator spot... until I planted figwort. Never had anything get action like the figwort!
I have spearmint in my garden, and the bees and butterflies are literally pushing each other out of the way to get at them some days.
"Drop the tle, it's cleaner."
Not old, evolved. Bees were going extinct, remember?