Botany: Scent of Death Attracts Coffin Flies to Pipevine Flowers
Published:22 Jun.2021 Source:Technische Universität Dresden
Plants use numerous mechanisms for their pollination. Now botanists have discovered a particularly sophisticated system among pipevines that is based purely on deception.
The flowers of the Greek plant Aristolochia microstom emit a foul, musty scent that seems to mimic the smell of decaying insects. The fly pollinators from the genus Megaselia likely get attracted to this odor while searching for arthropod corpses to potentially mate over and lay their eggs. Then, when entering the tube of an Aristolochia flower, the flies are guided by downward-pointing hairs into a small chamber, which holds the female and male floral organs. Trapped inside, they deposit pollen they carry onto the stigma, before the stamens ripen and release pollen on the body of the flies. When the hairs that block the entrance to the chamber wither, the pollinators can escape, and a new cycle can begin.