While pollinator season is year-round, globally, National Pollinator Week is designated to celebrate and generate awareness for animals who pollinate flowers. Most people already know that some pollinators, like monarch butterflies and honeybees (not native to the U.S.), have experienced population declines. This year, the first native bee was added to the Endangered Species List (rusty patched bumble bee). Hummingbirds are admired pollinators, while moths and bats are often overlooked. Lizard, mouse, fly, and beetle pollinators missed out on the public relations campaigns and are not well known.
A study earlier this year looked at the importance of vertebrate pollinators and found that preventing birds and bats from visiting flowers can reduce the plant’s fruit and seed production by an average of 63 percent.
"So far, we've only looked at bird, mammal and reptile pollinators. These are much more important in tropical countries than here in the UK, although some of our birds, including blue tits, sometimes visit flowers and transfer pollen.
"We show that if we lost all those vertebrate pollinators, on average almost two thirds of fruit and seed production would be lost from the plants that depend on them for pollination.” [...]
Over 920 species of birds – including hummingbirds, sunbirds, honeyeaters and lories—visit flowers and act as pollinators.
Not all pollinators who hover are hummingbirds.
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Some pollinators have weird secrets.
Many butterflies require specific host plants (or plant family) for the larvae to eat, such as the pipevine swallowtail who eats pipevine (Aristolochea spp.).
Sonication is a pollination method of bumblebees and solitary bees. The insects vibrate to cause pollen release from specialized flower anthers that are sealed except for a tiny pore at the top or small slits along the side. These anthers only can release pollen when vibrated at a particular frequency so they depend on their bee buzzers. Examples of plants that require sonication include shooting stars (Primula/Dodecatheon spp.), many plants in the Solanaceae (tomato, eggplant, potato), blueberry, and cranberry.
Of the world’s major crop species, 75 percent need animal pollinators to some degree.
In Oregon, alfalfa farmers manage habitat for ground-nesting bees.
An estimated 87.5 percent of the world’s flowering plants are pollinated by animals. Can you match the animal to the flower(s) they pollinate? (Key to answers at the end of this story.)
Besides insects and birds, other animal pollinators (vertebrates like bats, mice, and lizards) usually have co-evolved dependent relationships with the plants they pollinate and the flowers require these animals. The plant Roussea simplex depends on the bluetail day gecko for pollination.
The gecko provides the only means of pollination for the critically endangered R. simplex, an unusual climbing shrub that is the only living species of its family, and, like the gecko, lives only on the island of Mauritius, 900 kilometers east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. A non-native, invasive species to Mauritius, the white-footed ant Technomyrmex albipes also dines on R. simplex nectar and fruit, sometimes blocking the opening of the flower with dirt to create a safe stable for mealybugs, which the ant tends in exchange for a sugary secretion of honeydew. The aggressively competitive ants chase off the geckos, resulting in greatly reduced seed set in ant-infested R. simplex plants.
Bat pollinated plants are called chiropterophilous (bat-loving).
The exclusion of bat pollinators had a particularly strong effect on their plant consorts, reducing fruit production by 83 percent, on average. Bats pollinate about 528 plant species worldwide, including crops like dragon fruit, African locust beans, and durian, Southeast Asia’s “King of Fruits.” [...]
Many bat species have coevolved intimate interdependencies with the plants that feed them in exchange for pollen transport. Among them, blue agave (Agave tequilana), the source of tequila, depends entirely on the greater (Leptonycteris nivalis) and lesser (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) long-nosed bats. The cacti open their long, narrow flowers only at night, luring in the bats with the fragrance of rotten fruit. Both bat species are endangered or near threatened.
A South African flower, Pagoda lily, is pollinated at night by mice whose bodies get covered with pollen as they lick the nectar.
W. bifolia pollen was found around the snouts and in the faeces of live-trapped mice, the latter likely as a result of grooming their fur, since they visited the flowers without eating or destroying them. W. bifolia has characters of the rodent pollination floral syndrome such as visually inconspicuous, bowl-shaped flowers close to the ground, with stiff stamens as well as easily accessible, very viscous nectar and a weak, slightly sourish-nutty scent.
Don’t forget the trees! Some tree flowers require animal pollinators and many trees provide nectar.
Did you guess who pollinates magnolia trees?
1 (bee) = 5 (spearmint).; 2 (moth) = 1 (evening primrose) & 3 (magnolia); 3 (butterfly) = 4 (milkweed);
4 (fly) = 2 (Jack in the Pulpit); 5 (beetle) = 3 (magnolia).
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