Flowers can hear buzzing bees—and it makes their nectar
sweeter
Michelle Z.
Donahue
"Even on the
quietest days, the world is full of sounds: birds chirping, wind rustling
through trees, and insects humming about their business. The ears of both
predator and prey are attuned to one another’s presence.
... What if it
wasn’t just animals that could sense sound—what if plants could, too? The first
experiments to test this hypothesis... suggest that in at least one case,
plants can hear, and it confers a real evolutionary advantage..."
Flowers respond to pollinator sound within minutes by
increasing nectar sugar concentration
Marine Veits et
al.
Can plants hear?
That is, can they sense airborne sounds and respond to them? Here we show that
Oenothera drummondii flowers, exposed to the playback sound of a flying bee or
to synthetic sound-signals at similar frequencies, produced sweeter nectar
within 3 minutes, potentially increasing the chances of cross pollination. We
found that the flowers vibrated mechanically in response to these sounds,
suggesting a plausible mechanism where the flower serves as the plant's auditory
sensory organ. Both the vibration and the nectar response were
frequency-specific: the flowers responded to pollinator sounds, but not to
higher frequency sound. Our results document for the first time that plants can
rapidly respond to pollinator sounds in an ecologically relevant way.
Sensitivity of plants to pollinator sound can affect plant-pollinator
interactions in a wide range of ways: Plants could allocate their resources
more adequately, focusing on the time of pollinator activity; pollinators would
then be better rewarded per time unit; flower shape may be selected for its
effect on hearing ability, and not only on signaling; and pollinators may
evolve to make sounds that the flowers can hear. Finally, our results suggest
that plants may be affected by other sounds as well, including antropogenic
ones.
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