A really interesting paper on the evolution of plant-pollinator interactions came out this week in Science. It also got press in the New York Times and the LA Times, which is great-- go science in the media! Why is it interesting, you ask? Because plants are master manipulators. They can't directly move themselves around to find one another to mate, so they get animals to move their plant sperm (pollen) to other plant eggs (ovules inside flowers). But the animals that are doing this service don't necessarily know they are helping a plant reproduce-- they are just in it for the reward, which usually takes the form of sugary nectar that is also in the flower (often hidden so that the animal has to squeeze in to drink, thereby rubbing the pollen they carried onto the female part of the flower). This paper shows that certain plants use other chemicals in addition to sugar in their nectar to change pollinator behavior. In this case, bees which drank nectar with caffeine (which is naturally found in certain plant species) were much more likely to remember floral scents in memory trials that the researchers performed. The implication is that flowers have evolved nectar with caffeine to cajole pollinators into remembering that flower (of all the types of flowers that pollinator might visit), and coming back to flowers with that scent cue for more reward, which would help that species of plant reproduce. Another cool aspect of the paper is that the authors studied the effect of caffeine on the bee brain, measuring and locating neural and receptor activity, to see how bees react to caffeine and form memories. Even though bees have very different brain structures from mammals, it seems that caffeine may work on similar neurotransmitter pathways in the two groups. This implies a unified mechanism of learning and memory development across many groups of organisms, which is truly cool.
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AuthorLots of scientific research that is being conducted is fascinating... but often it is in hard to understand language. Here I will try to translate current research papers into the "cool science" they are underneath all that jargon. ArchivesCategories
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