What is truly unusual is to have the same display being used for attracting both pollen and seed dispersers because they are almost always at different times and for different organisms. This a member of the Gesner (African violet) family from Costa Rica, Columnea purpurata, and the leaves are arranged to make a flat array along a stem forming a canopy over its flowers and fruits. So this is photographed from below as this branch extends out over your head (it grows as an epiphytic shrub). Both the flowers' persistent calyx and the subtending bract are bright orange and hairy, and the entire cluster of flowers, at both dispersal stages, produces a single display. At the right hand end of the cluster you can just see a yellow corolla tube and at the left hand end an orange berry is visible (arrows). The reason one display works for both dispersal stages is that birds are the dispersers of both pollen (hummingbirds) and seed (diverse frugivores), and such a large, bright display is needed in the shady understory.
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
Don't tell me they found Tyrannosaurus rex meat again!1 week ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
-
Course Corrections4 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Attractive display for dispersers of tropical plant
It's been awhile since blogging about the tropics. Those of us who study flowers are used to seeing diverse displays to attract pollinators. This is also true for fruit displays attracting seed dispersers. Now of course both of these are floral displays, but at different times in the flower's functional life, and most people just aren't used to thinking of fruits as flowers at the time of seed dispersal.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment