How flowers use scent and nectar to manipulate pollinators and herbivores
Thursday, July 9, 2015 - 09:30
in Biology & Nature
Some pollinators not only provide fertilization services for flowering plants, they also lay their eggs on the plants' leaves after they have visited the flowers. Voracious caterpillars hatch from these eggs and their enormous appetite can easily kill the plants. So when plants advertise for pollinators they frequently also attract herbivores. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, demonstrated in field trials that the flowers of the coyote tobacco Nicotiana attenuata are able to solve this dilemma.