Magnolias Are So Old That They're Pollinated by Beetles, Not Bees
mymodernmet.com144 points by speckx 5 days ago
144 points by speckx 5 days ago
These are the original articles this re-heat was created from:
- https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/magnolias-be...
- https://gardens.si.edu/learn/blog/the-botany-of-magnolias/
Thanks. The first article has more info, e.g. that those beetles are flightless.
But that makes me suspect that they spend a lot of time on one tree, only pollinating that tree, which would be pointless because there is no exchange of genes.
A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators
One of those moths is this guy, who (in flight, not so much in still images) looks and sounds like a miniature hummingbird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-moth
For many people, it is the other way around. It is very remarkable that there is a bird, which looks so much like a big version of this butterfly!
After all, in Europe these butterflies are commonplace, but I've never seen the American bird in my life.
I noticed these for the first time earlier this summer. Incredible insects! They really do give a hummingbird impression.
rare instance where the German name Taubenschwänzchen ('little dove-tail') is nicer than the English name
I have to say that if we're also talking about wild grasses, my wire fox terrier is also a pollinator. He collects an incredible amount of seeds and burrs during his walkies investigations and I have to pick them out of his fur afterwards (risky because he gets annoyed easily).
Seeds are not gametes. While your dog may help spread the seeds, they are not assisting in the sexual reproduction itself.
mosquitoes too, though it pains me to give them credit for anything
True, all mosquitoes drink nectar, and only females of some species drink blood.
And olive trees have genders, with the male pollinating the surrounding females.
My pawpaws (Asimina triloba) mainly need (house) flies to pollinate. They make their flowers look like meat.
I have a couple 100 foot rows of them, it's tricky to get good pollination.
My grandpappy told me that if you want a good crop of pawpaws you have to hang a dead cat in the tree. I think dead cats were in greater supply back in his day.
Fascinating flowers for a tree though. Red meat color and odor only a fly could love.
For anyone that’s close, go to the upcoming Ohio Pawpaw festival! https://ohiopawpawfest.com/
the little beetle that could, and pawpaw's are self-incompatible. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba#Pollination
plenty of sap beetles around here, but i don't tend to see them on my pawpaws. they come around later season when my raspberries ripen
would not rule out the cash crop farming on both sides of me from doing a number on the insects, though i seem to have plenty overall.
unfortunately an excessive number of japanese beetles
Some insects gather nectar from a flower and don't pollinate the flower. This is called nectar robbing.
See https://www.backyardecology.net/not-all-flower-visitors-are-...
What’s the best security control against this robbery?!
This is what the shape of the flower and its placement of the stamen and pistils are all about.
The earliest angiosperms appeared in the Cretaceous. This is after the appearance of Hymenoptera (Jurassic) and Diptera (Triassic). While a nice story, this needs additional substantiation. An alternative explanation is likelier imo.
The early Hymenoptera were predatory, like wasps still are.
Bees, which feed on pollen and nectar from plant flowers, instead of catching other insects, have evolved much later from wasp-like Hymenoptera, after angiosperms were already widespread.
So the timeline fits into the story.
> were predatory ... ?
Were they? Sawflies are herbivores, and are at minimum share a common ancestor with those that were not herbivores.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.
Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.
You mean honeybees? Because there are lots of other (wild) bee species that are very specialized. And they also contradict most of the other things we think we know about bees: they are usually solitary, and they rarely sting (honeybees only do that to protect the hive).
Maybe it's the other way around: humans selected honeybees to "domesticate" because of their versatility (and of course the fact that they produced honey)?
Around my location (southern brazil) there are hundreds of species of stingless bees, living in colonies. Many (most?) produce honey too. I don't dispute that there are also lots of solitary bees. Bees are wonderful and way more diverse than people usually think.
Jumping spiders are smarter
Are they? They are smarter than web-spinning spiders but I've never read anything suggesting they are smarter than bees.
Obviously you can't give them an IQ test but all the data I've seen (and I am no expert here) shows they are possible the smartest arthropod out there. There are of course different species of jumping spider so mileage may vary.
I've watched videos of them stalking prey and they seem extremely intelligent for their size. It's very impressive.
Bees' intelligence relies on them being a hive organism.
Spiders are not insects though https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...
Restricting the word "insects" to hexapods is a modern convention that does not have any basis in etymology.
Aristotle used the word "insects" for all terrestrial arthropods and this was followed for millennia until the last two centuries when someone preferred to use "Insecta" instead of "Hexapoda", without giving any reason for this, and others followed this taxonomy.
Even so, the exact extent of the term "insects" varies between biologists, because some do not include all wingless hexapods under "insects".
In an informal discussion, I do not see any mistake in using the word "insects" with its original meaning from Aristotle, which is also the meaning that can be encountered in a lot of old books. For unambiguous animal classification, the word "hexapods" is preferable.
This is a discussion about animal intelligence. Jumping spiders have a different brain layout than bees, which are formally insects. Other insects are more like the bee than spiders.
So in this case, it matters that spiders are not in fact insects in the strict sense.
Thanks, I never thought about bees like that. They certainly can use many types of flowers, as evidenced by various sorts of honey. Nitpick: some spiders are pretty darn intelligent and even seem to dream when they sleep, apparently.
Now I am musing about spider nightmares.
Thousands of tiny humans crawling all over you...
Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?
My magnolia is the only thing that seems to attract honeybees, which I rarely see otherwise. The article doesn't seem to justify the "not bees" part, though. I'd imagine bees can pollinate them too.
Living fossils, like Ginkos
And Equisetum/Horsetail/Schachtelhalm
Magnolia make one of my favorite smells on earth. We have a huge one in front of a house we have moved away from and back to many times. The intoxicating smell when I mow the leaves and seeds beneath it is something I want to keep forever. I collected the red seeds and put them in a bottle with alcohol and I go back and smell it often to remember. The house flooded four days before closing on selling it, so we got more time with the house. We are wrapping that up and we will say goodbye to that old house, and it’s now quite huge magnolia in the front. I never knew the flowers were pollinated by beetles or why the scent smelled like that. I collected seeds last year and cold stratified a bunch all winter in our fridge. I planted them this spring and 7 survived the process and are now growing in red cups in my new house.
Mountain mints are also pollinated by beetles—and a bazillion other critters. They are extraordinary pollinator magnets. Beetles, bees, flies, wasps, mosquitos (!), moths, butterflies, ...
A recent study of just a few mountain mint species (https://doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2024.2411072) found that they attracted a crazy variety of pollinators. Check the supplementary materials for the full list.
Mosquitoes (which are flies) don’t really deserve the exclamation mark, given that the males of all mosquito species live exclusively on nectar, with the females (of most but not all species) augmenting their diet with animal protein in order to produce eggs.
The long, thin proboscis originally evolved for nectar drinking like in many other insects (and some birds!); its use for sucking animal blood was a later adaptation.
I have spearmint in my garden, and the bees and butterflies are literally pushing each other out of the way to get at them some days.
I have mountain mint growing in my yard and every pollinator imaginable goes to that plant.
I have slender mountain mint and it used to be a popular pollinator spot... until I planted figwort. Never had anything get action like the figwort!