A fun article came out in the January edition of the American Naturalist called "Insectivorous Bat Pollinates Columnar Cactus More Effectively per Visit than Specialized Nectar Bat". Why is it fun, you ask? It always seems like plants and their pollinators have co-evolved together, each gaining special adaptations (traits) that make the interaction more "lock and key". We can see this in the shape of a cactus blossom, and the snout of a long-nosed bat, which fits inside that flower so well. BUT, nature is always a little more complicated than that, and this paper shows how an insect-eating bat, the pallid bat that occurs along side the lesser long-nosed bat in Baja, where the cardon cactus lives, delivers many more pollen grains per visit to the flowers than the lesser long nosed bat. So in effect, it is a better pollinator, even though the other bat is specialized to only feed on nectar, and looks like the mammal version of a hummingbird. And partially this is precisley BECAUSE the insect-eating bat doesn't have a special long snout to get into the flower, and consequently gets pollen all over its head and shoulders as it clumsily tries to get at the nectar. It also seems to hang out at the flower for longer. Check out this video comparing the two flower visitation styles, and also this video the American Museum of Natural History created to describe the findings of the paper.
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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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