Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.
~ Message from a graduate student~.
Secret communication between non-flowering and pollinators
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| Yuta Sunagawa |
| Department of Biological Sciences 2nd Year Master's Student |
| Birthplace Shizuoka Prefecture |
| High School Hamamatsu Kita High School |
| Faculty Department of Biology, School of Science, The UTokyo |
A forest at sunset. Even if I strained my eyes, all I could see was darkness. Listening to the sound of the stream, I just wait by the flowers. When I shined my flashlight on the flowers, I saw a small insect with a clump of yellow pollen on it. It's here. I suppressed the excitement in my heart, set up my camera, and released the shutter. What I captured was a scene no one had ever seen before. --The first time I saw a flower bloom, I wondered why it bloomed.
Why do flowers bloom? It is to carry pollen. Each flower has its own characteristic color, shape, smell, and blooming style, and waits for animals (pollinators) such as insects that carry pollen.
The diversity of flowers found on the earth today is the result of the evolution of plants to efficiently attract pollinators to their flowers. The most spectacular example of this is the orchid family. The orchid family is one of the largest families of angiosperms, with more than 25,000 species known worldwide, and it is also known for its great variety of floral forms. As Charles Darwin, a famous evolutionary theorist, argued in "The Origin of Species," this diversity is thought to have arisen from the diversity of pollination patterns, i.e., the specialization of flowers for different pollinators. For example, orchids attract bees by mimicking other flowers without producing nectar, which is a reward for pollinators; orchids attract flies attracted to dead flesh by producing reddish-black flowers with a rotten odor; orchids attract male bees seeking mates by producing a substance similar to female pheromones from their flowers. However, at this point in time, the mode of pollination has not yet been elucidated. However, at this point, less than 10% of all orchid species have a known mode of pollination, and there are still many hidden ecological systems that defy our common sense. Even at this very moment, there is a "secret exchange between flowers and pollinators" going on somewhere, unbeknownst to us. I am conducting research every day to uncover this.
Much of my research is conducted in the field where plants grow naturally. Sometimes I climb mountains, get rained on, and spend the night in the forest while freezing. Although it can be physically and mentally demanding at times, I feel that there are many things that can be learned only by actually touching, smelling, and hearing the life of living creatures in nature. And when the long-awaited moment arrives and the mystery is solved, the emotion and excitement are exceptional.
The opening paragraph is a scene in which I found a tamabae, the pollinator of the orchid Yoraku orchid, one of the world's smallest flowering plants in the orchid family ( press release, April 2024 ). Although I have found the pollinator, I still do not know why this tamabae is the only one that visits the orchid flowers. My current goal is to uncover the whole story of the "secret exchange" between the orchid and the tamabae.
(A) Inflorescence of the orchid with one of the smallest flowers in the orchid family, (B) Pollinator tamabae with yellow pollen clusters on their heads.
I love flowers. I am fascinated by their beauty, cuteness, and cool appearance. Naturally, the reason why I chose my current research field is because I love flowers. People around me often tell me, "It's nice that you are doing what you love. I think "science" is a place where I can pursue what I "like," "find interesting," and "want to know. In a modern way, this is my "guesswork" life. What a nice life to be able to make "guesswork" my main job.