Have you thanked a bumblebee today?

Land plants had a problem; they inherited swimming sperm from their algal ancestors, but they no longer lived in an aquatic environment. Flowering plants, the most recent group of land plants to appear, have solved the “swimming sperm” problem by having evolved miniaturized haploid males that do the dispersing over distances far too great for any sperm to swim. These tiny male organisms are called pollen, and unlike most other land plants who used wind or water to disperse their spores, over 80% of flowering plants use biotic dispersers – animals who are rewarded or seduced or deceived into acting as pollen vectors. Over 200,000 insect species act as pollinators – mostly bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, and flies. About 1000 species of birds and mammals (mostly bats) also function as pollinators. This biotic interaction is quite important to our species because quite a large number of the plants that we depend upon require pollinators to reproduce, and in the case of fruit and seed crops, to produce what we want. So this week is set aside to celebrate pollination. Woo, hoo! Here beetles and butterflies participate in the pollination of wild carrot. Such wild pollinators provide billions of dollars of serve to us, yet too often they are taken for granted and our activities may be reducing many of their populations.

Darwin Bicentennial Special Edition

In honor of the bicentennial of Darwin's Origin of Species the Botanical Society of America is publishing a special issue of the American Journal of Botany, and you can get a FREE historial article entitled "The meaning of Darwin's "abominable mystery". Everyone usually interprets this to mean the evolutionay ancestry of flowering plants was a mystery with respect to their ancestry, and other than it being clear flowering plants had a common ancestry with gymnosperms, it must be admitted that this remains an area of active hypothesis formation. But this was not Darwin's concern.

Ned Friedman clarifies that Darwin was referring to the sudden appearance of considerable flowering plant diversity in the fossil record. Darwin would have been seen this as less of a problem if the fossil record were as well known 150 years ago as it is today, but that's why we do research, to learn things. The clarification is based in part upon Darwin's own explanation of the problem in a letter Joseph Hooker written in 1879 (facsimile included).

So treat yourself to a scientific present! And maybe commit yourself to a new year's resolution to reduce your plant blindness, a common scientific affliction.