Investissez dans les crèmes solaires!

Alors que les français commencent à râler des coûts de l’essence, plutôt que de se réjouir d’un effet prohibitif naturel à la combustion des énergies fossiles, et plutôt que de réfléchir aux comportements qu’il conviendrait d’adopter en ce qui concerne une crise qui risque fort de s’enliser et de durer, des scientifiques tirent encore plus fort la sonnette d’alarme à propos du réchaufement climatique: à force de céder devant les lobbys négationnistes et les illusions gouvernementales (si délires ne conviendrait pas mieux), nous avons considérablement sous-estimé la vitesse à laquelle le dérèglement climatique pourrait se manifester. Qu’à cela ne tienne, la réponse est prévue pour dans 7 à 10 ans… Investissez donc dans la crème solaire!

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Berrygo Round #5 is up!

You can read this wonderful edition at A Neotropical Savanna just here… This month, BGR is commemorating Linneaus’ birthday with plants. The result is a delicious melting pot of grand taxonomy, treeing and other flowers, a great food and agriculture section and a lot more… Go read.

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Interlude (sounds like)

“On n’est pas là pour se faire engueuler” (we haven’t come to get told off) is a song by Boris Vian that I only recently discovered (this is rather curious because it’s apparently well known but hey!).

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Best fruit ever?

Pomegranate (Punica granatum), is a fruit originating from Iran and now cultivated in many countries around the Mediterranean Sea. It used to be cooked as juice though this role is now way past. We can find it sold for consumption as a fruit by now, and indeed, it’s really fresh and amazingly accomodate life at the warmest part of the day. But wait, I didn’t track back to the few papers about domestication yet, that I was already swamped into an incredibly huge amount of litterature dealing with its potential other economical uses as pharmaceutical. You won’t believe it!

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Look for caterpillars, meet orchids!

Attracting pollinators is not only about being colourful but to produce a decent scent. With decent, it is not necessarily meant a perfume-like odour, but something attracting a pollinator. This may be a highly specific task, because when you aim to attract specific pollinators, you decrease the odds that it will disperse your precious gametes to any other plant. If you succeed to make it loyal and visit your own kind next, it will prove highly rewarding because you have some hope to sire offspring instead of wasting pollen…

 And that’s what Epipactis helleborine (left) is doing. It’s producing a scent that attracts a rather specific pollinator (well, “specific” with regard to its pollinating behaviour at least), common wasps. This scent is similar to compounds emitted by herbivore-damaged plants. Wasps are thus lured into thinking they will find some fleshy caterpillar, and go their way to the orchid. Hereafter, they still obtain a somewhat interesting reward (a sweet nectar), that may lead to the wasp further visiting Epipactis helleborine. But it’s still a lure, not a fair game. Apparently, a closely related species also mainly pollinated by wasps, Epipactis purpurata, is using the same strategy, while another species within the Genus, Epipactis atrorubens (right), doesn’t (it is specialized on being pollinated by bees, which are contributing to the flower scent too, but for another reason ;).

Read the complete story at Not exactly Rocket Science (but still with rocking posts) here…

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Dam(n)!

I don’t tell you anything about this, but I swear this is really worth reading. Really.

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Just calligraphically beautiful

Seedsaside was ‘translated’ from google.jo, see the result here. I find the result very appealing, despite untranslated words to be read –> while anything else <– (but numbers)… I wonder if the automatized translation worked good enough, but I really like the resulting page. And I was trapped by the scrolling tool being on the left, not on the right.

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Bees segregate between recently visited and unvisited flowers

That may not be news (the study in question* was published in 1992), but this is a rather interesting result… Bees are able to detect if flowers have been visited by another bee, and more readily leave those that have recently been. This behaviour is not difficult to explain: you better have to move if there is less to forage (don’t waste your time where reward is probably lower). Direct cues to assess nectar availability can be used by bees (when nectar content of a flower can be seen, or smelled), but this way isn’t always possible with any flower morphology and requires some level of inspection, i.e. there is a time cost. But bees are making the process easier by marking the flowers they visit with a special scent.

The effect of the scent was here experimentally reduced in the study (with artificial flowers) via an air extractor. When on, flower rejection dramatically decreased, flower inspection and visit time were also increased, while the number of visits was unchanged between the two experimental conditions. I find it amazing how far and finely tuned behaviours have evolved in these insects…

But we may also notice that the experimental flowers were still providing a great reward even after they were visited. This means bees in the experiment were stuck into their innate foraging method and losing resources aside. This probably means there is no such thing as a continuously rewarding flower in nature… :-)

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M. Giurfa and J.A. Nunez (1992).Honeybees mark with scent and reject recently visited flowers. Oecologia 89: 113-117.

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Berry Go Round expected soon…

Berry Go Round #5 will be hosted at A Neotropical Savanna. Please send your submissions before the 25th… Any post plant related does it, and don’t forget you can suggest your favourite posts even if not your own (BGR is still a young carnival and unsollicited submissions are readily accepted: it allows diversifying the still sparse plant blogosphere!).

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Carnival bunch…

More or less late about these, but here are some recent and quite cool carnivals:

• Tangled Bank #105 (at the Beagle Project)
• Festival of the Trees #23 (at 10000 Birds)
• Linneaus Legacy #7 (at the Ethical Palaeontologist)
• Oekology #16 (at Scientific Blogging)

I guess this is enough to read until this evening… :-)

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