It was butterflies that cut them. Thomas Rupp, a PhD student in ecology at the Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, was walking through a mountain forest with his colleagues in a field near Athens, Greece, when he saw them: insect-like insects eat a special kind of plant called Aristolochia microstoma. “Wherever I saw this butterfly fly,” Rupp says, “I knew there must be others. Aristolochia it grows around. ”
Rupp knelt down to find the strange flowers of the plant hidden between the rocks and leaves. It is a surprisingly reddish tinge, and looks like an air bulb connected by a narrow tube attached to a small pore called a stoma. All of these things look like they get into the gut. Si. It’s very difficult.
Environmentalists have long speculated that these flowers may be used in a subtle way to attract visitors, who carry their pollen to the same species after flowering. Many flowers provide beautiful leaves for this purpose. But no A. microstoma. “It’s a lie,” says Stefan Dötterl, Rupp’s adviser and naturalist. “They promise something. They seem to be giving the reward they do no stay. That is why he deceives people who remove pollen from pollen. ”
The “pollen” method was not immediately clear – some orchids said transformed into look and smell like the bugs that are trying to marry you, as well as the celebrities corpse flowers attracts insects in search of rotten meat. But in research published in May in the newspaper Boundaries of Ecology and Evolution, the team found that the plants attract pollinators through a different odor of death: the beetle’s scent. It is the first report of a plant that smells like rotting carcasses, and the Rupp team demonstrates how this mutated method works to catch unexpected flies.
We have to say that flies are amazing. Phoridae, a family of flies that includes “boxflies,” is known to lay eggs in beetles. Phorids also contain human carcasses. They can be clues as to where the body is buried, and scientists can use it to estimate how long a person has died. “They are the most important insects that people use to make medical science, and here they are visiting a flower that is thought to resemble corpses or remains,” he says. Anne Gaskett, a naturalist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who is not involved in the project. Gaskett studies how plants, especially orchids, lure waste. “It’s very similar to what you might think and what they actually found.”
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