Flowers move to attract the attention of insects that pollinate them, a scientific study finds. Flowers "signal" insects to attract their attention, says a team of scientists. The finding helps explain why so many flowers ripple in the breeze and reveal a trick not known to date to get pollinators' attention. The specialists made the discovery by studying wildflowers known as sirens of the sea, typical of the Welsh coast of the United Kingdom.

 

Rocking flowers also attract a wider variety of insect species than more static flowers. For many years, biologists have known that flowers use bold colors, fragrances, elaborately shaped petals, and nectars to attract insects that pollinate them, such as bees and flies. However, no one had seriously considered whether his movements in the wind represented similar signals. Birthday gift "I was lounging on the beach watching the flowers sway in the wind for my daughter's birthday and I wondered why they have stems and risk being damaged in such exposed habitat," says John Warren of the University of Aberystwth, Wales. .

 

Warren reviewed the research that had been done previously and found very few answers. "The only reference I found about movements to attract pollination pointed out that it was something that was probably unimportant because insects are not good at detecting movement, which is clearly stupid." To learn more about the subject, Dr. Warren and his colleague Penri James experimented with the maritime Silene species, which grows on an exposed shoreline within a scientific site of interest, located in Cardigan Bay in West Wales.

 

They devoted themselves to observing 300 flowers on stems of various lengths. They kept track of the movement of each flower in the wind, how many times it was visited by insects, and for how long, and how many seeds it produced. Their experiment revealed that the flowers with long, thin stems move more in the wind. This acts as a powerful signal to passing insects, allowing the plant to attract more insects than the less mobile flowers that grow on short, thick stems.

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"We found that the flowers that sway in the wind are more visible to insects and therefore attract more pollination and more seeds," Warren said. However, Warren believes that ultimately the flowers face a sacrifice to evolve it. "The short, thick-stemmed flowers don't move enough and are less attractive to pollinators. However, flowers that move a lot are not firm enough to allow insects to land on them." "Only the flowers that move just enough are the ones that are successful in producing seeds."