Tricky Nature
Novel way to adapt
A black-chinned hummingbird visits a Nicotiana attenuata flower
The tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata has a love-hate relationship with the hawkmoths that visit its flowers every night. The moths pollinate the plant, but they also drop off eggs that hatch into very hungry caterpillars. Now ecologists have found that when a tobacco plant is being clobbered by caterpillars, it shifts the time of day its flowers open. That makes it more appealing to hummingbirds, a more benign pollinator that doesn't eat leaves. Ecologist Danny Kessler noticed the change in flowering time in 2008. He works at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, but does his field studies in Utah, where the plant, a wild relative of cultivated tobacco, grows. That summer, he was trying to get a picture of the plant being pollinated for a study that was about to come out in Science--one good enough for the cover of the journal. "I noticed that the flowers really looked different in the morning." And there were a lot more of them. N. attenuata normally flowers at dusk and leaves its flowers open until 9:00 or so the next morning, but these plants were opening new flowers in the morning. "That's not supposed to happen," says Kessler's colleague Ian Baldwin, an ecologist at the same institute. Source: ScienceNow
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