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Do you remember what you did yesterday? Otherwise, you may want to take a lesson of Nasa poissoniana, a star-shaped flowering plant of the Peruvian Andes with an unusual skill set.
These plants can agitate around their stamens – the organs they use for fertilization – to maximize the distribution of their pollen. More surprisingly, a study published last month in Plant Signaling and Behavior suggests that each plant can adjust the timing of these movements based on its past experiences with pollinators. In other words, they remember the past and try to repeat it.
The discovery joins others who have recently painted an increasingly broad picture of what plants can feel, learn and do. The study, though small and preliminary, "presents a promising new and intriguing system for studying plant memory," said Peter Crisp, a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota.
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Nasa poissoniana belongs to a sub-family of plants called Loasoideae. They are known for their polychrome flowers, as well as for the "really painful" burning hairs on their stems, explains Tilo Henning, one of the main authors of the study.
Dr. Henning, researcher at the Botanical Garden and Berlin Botanical Museum, worked with Loasoideae for almost two decades, with his collaborator Maximilian Weigend of the University of Bonn in Germany. From the beginning, "the complexity of the flowers has delighted us," he said. It was the same for their tendency to thigmonastie or their movement.
While other plants curl their leaves or catapult their seeds, many species of Loasoideae move their stamens: long lean filaments capped with pollen. Loasoideae The stamens begin to bloom, group and lodge in the petals of the flower. During the life of the flower, the stamens sway one by one in the center of the flower, where they stand and offer fresh pollen to insect visitors.
It takes less than three minutes for a Loasoideae stamen to go from the outside inimitable to factory standards. In some species, this movement can be caused by light and temperature, or by the pollinators themselves. When a bee searches the center of the flower for nectar, it triggers the next stop, ready for a new bee or the return of the previous one. In this way, the flowers maximize their chances of transferring pollen to many different flowers.
For this last study, researchers divided Nasa poissoniana in several groups. "Pollinators" – in this case humans with probes – visited the first group every 15 minutes, rustling the parts containing the flower nectar. They disturbed the second group every 45 minutes. Other groups were left alone as witnesses.
The next day, the researchers observed the flowers. Those that had been visited every 15 minutes were planned for this time and turned to the new stamens faster and more often. The second group was more apathetic, and its concentration in fresh stamens peaked at the mark of 45 minutes. The factories "anticipated pollinator visits," said Dr. Henning, who expects the other Loasoideae members to also have this talent.
Whether you apply such adjectives to these plants or not, Dr. Henning says that he wants to know why they are making such difficult efforts.
"The huge overall costs these plants invest in," he explains, "spread their pollen. "There are a number of similar successful plant groups. But none of them shows such an elaborate effort. "
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