#flower morphology

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

Now that I’m back to dealing with my drafts, we’re gonna look at how fucking weird pitcher plants’ flowers are. Well, the whole plant is weird I guess, but after how conventional the fly traps’ flowers are, these are indeed bizarre. When we saw them, they were towards the end of their bloom cycle, but they’re like...a fleshy simulation of a flower, with the basic standard shape but lacking the feel. Two different species here: Sarracenia flava and S. purpurea, colors coordinating with those of their pitchers.

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

A whole hillside of Hydrangea arborescens - one of our native hydrangeas, with green fruit. Sometimes these will have the large, showy sterile flowers around the edges, although I didn’t see any, and those persist after the fertile flowers are gone. This can look quite striking in the winter:

That looks more hydrangea-y, right? The cultivated varieties are bred to have more of the sterile flowers, and fewer (or none) of the fertile ones. Pretty, but not so useful to the plant.

[nybg]

Essentially, the flower “creates ways to select or control the identities of its pollinators,” he said. The hummingbird’s niche is being strong and capable enough to feed at difficult angles, and the bloom benefits because the bird casts pollen so widely.

Coevolution, the process in which two species evolve in lockstep with each other, is a phenomenon that dates back to Charles Darwin. Darwin was intrigued by an odd orchid Angraecum sesquipedale. The star orchid is a beautiful flower, sure, but it was the flower's long nectar tube that intrigued Darwin, he posited that in order for the flower to survive, it would require a pollinator with a very long proboscis that mimicked the flowers odd morphology. Darwin was ridiculed for this suggestion because no such thing had ever been seen in Madagascar. And then, lo and behold, four decades later Darwin's prediction was proven correct upon the discovery of the hawk moth and its amazing proboscis.

In the case of these droopy flowers and their sugar-fueled avian pollinators, the balance is more subtle. Droopy flowers mean hummingbirds have to expend more energy to reach the nectar, but the nectar is more pure (not having been diluted by rain or harvested by insect pollinators). For the flowers, they become dependent upon a single species, but that single species has a great memory and is wide ranging, which means that the flower's genetic material will be spread farther afield than if the flower relied upon buzzier buddies. Evolution is so amazing, wouldn't you agree? ~AR

(via Droopy Flowers and Their Wiles - NYTimes.com)