Unique bird pollination adaptation - poofty anthers

Here's a link to a newly published study describing and documenting a very unique bird pollination adaptation. The anthers have a "spongy" bulb of tissue and they are attractive to birds.  When a bird grasps the "bulb" to pluck it from the flower, the tissue collapses and blows a puff of pollen onto the face/head of the bird, thus placing the pollen in a location to be transferred to another flower's stigma. This is a totally unique anther adaptation. The common ornamental called the "wishbone" flower (Torenia) has levers on its anthers that when pushed squeeze out pollen like toothpaste from a tube, but that's still quite different.  In the bird pollination paper the flowers are part of the Melastome family, a group of plants that tend to have large, gaudy stamens (for example), but TPP has never seen anything like this.  Cool. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - How orderly!

The study of flowers at early stages of development requires nerves of steel for the delicate dissections. To really see what's going on the specimens are observed with a scanning electron microscope, and at early stages, flowers often reveal similarities and differences critical to understanding their evolutionary diversification, that is, how diversity in floral form arises from a basic plan. Here's a false color image of the androecium of a species of Anaxagorea, the basal genus of custard apple family. The early development of this flower shows a very orderly development of the androecium and gynoecium (perianth parts have been removed), 12 ranks, each rank consisting of 2-3 stamens, a staminode, and 1-2 pistils, and one pistil in the center. The numbers and orderliness tell us that within this lineage floral diversity has shifted to fewer parted and simpler flowers and to many more parted flowers of greater complexity. For comparison, here's the flower at maturity, fully open and functional. The parts you see in the SEM image are enclosed within 3 whorls of 3-parted perianth, and no, this is not a monocot, but a woody dicot in the Magnoliales. Thanks to AoB blog.

Are flowers manipulating your emotions?

Are flowers manipulating your emotions in a way that improves their resproductive success? Wow! The Phactor is truly stunned by this idea; it is stunningly stupid even for psychologists. As usual their approach is it’s all about us. There is a relevant question, which is why would humans find visual signals that evolved to interact with largely avian, hymenopteran, and lepidopteran, senses aesthetically pleasing? These are not the only pollinators, but generally humans don’t find flowers adapted to other pollinators so appealing. No one will argue that humans like flowers, and evidence shows this appreciation dates back at least to Neanderthals who buried people with flowers. But there’s no co-evolution here. Humans evolved in an environment dominated by flowering plants and without them satisfying all of our material needs, human life would be impossible. Humans do cultivate the flowers we like, thus making them more successful in human modified environments and so dependent upon our ministrations that most would immediately perish if the human influence was removed. So what’s wrong with this psychological “hypothesis”? Consider this remarkable statement: “[Plants] have discovered the secrets of our positive emotional response mechanisms, and have adapted themselves to exploit it.” Oh, this hurts. It’s like the worst stuff written on freshman biology exams. No organism adapts itself; a selective agent must act on the organisms such that the genetics of the population are altered. True just as humans have selected upon the wolf genome to produce somewhat less threatening variants, like toy poodles, humans have selected variants of our pet plants to produce bigger, more colorful, different colored, unnatural hybrids, and many parted flowers, some thereby rendered virtually sterile, and our ministrations keep them alive, although since they have no biological purpose personally the Phactor, who studies flowers' biologies, finds these cultivars of little interest. These preferences tell us a great deal about our likes, but no evidence exists that the more highly altered plants, those incapable of survival on their own elicit a greater positive emotional response in humans. Do humans appreciate those more than wild flowers? Sorry, but in only the most trivial sense might floral cultivars be considered an adaptation based upon human emotional responses. A daisy did not begin to look like a daisy because it pleased a Cro-magnon. Perhaps this is the stuff of “positive psychology”, but it sure makes a negative impression on me.