[Pollinator] Orchid Fossil shows Pollen-bearing Bee
Ladadams at aol.com
Ladadams at aol.com
Fri Aug 31 13:26:33 PDT 2007
Source: _Harvard University_ (http://www.harvard.edu/) Date: August
30, 2007 More on:
_Fossils_ (http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/fossils_ruins/fossils/) ,
_Paleontology_ (http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/fossils_ruins/paleontology/) ,
_Endangered Plants_
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/plants_animals/endangered_plants/) , _Evolutionary Biology_
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/plants_animals/evolution/) , _Evolution_
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/fossils_ruins/evolution/) , _Extinction_
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/plants_animals/extinction/)
First Orchid Fossil Puts Showy Blooms At Some 80 Million Years Old
_Science Daily_ (http://www.sciencedaily.com/) — Biologists at Harvard
University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee
as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests
orchids are old enough to have co-existed with dinosaurs.
Amber-preserved stingless bee carrying pollinia of Meliorchis caribea, the
first unambiguous fossil orchid known to science. This discovery enabled
researchers to calculate the time of origin of the orchid family. (Credit: Santiago
Ramírez)
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Their analysis, published recently in the journal Nature, indicates orchids
arose some 76 to 84 million years ago, much longer ago than many scientists had
estimated. The extinct bee they studied, preserved in amber with a mass of
orchid pollen on its back, represents some of the only direct evidence of
pollination in the fossil record.
"Since the time of Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been fascinated with
orchids' spectacular adaptations for insect pollination," says lead author
Santiago R. Ramírez, a researcher in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. "But while orchids are the
largest and most diverse plant family on Earth, they have been absent from the
fossil record."
The fossil record lacks evidence of orchids, Ramírez says, because they bloom
infrequently and are concentrated in tropical areas where heat and humidity
prevent fossilization. Their pollen is dispersed only by animals, not wind, and
disintegrates upon contact with the acid used to extract pollen from rocks.
Orchids' ambiguous fossil record has fed a longstanding debate over their
age, with various scientists pegging the family at anywhere from 26 to 112
million years old. Those arguing for a younger age have often pointed to the lack of
a meaningful fossil record as evidence of the family's youth, along with the
highly specialized flowers' need for a well-developed array of existing
pollinators to survive. Proponents of an older age for orchids had cited their
ubiquity around the world, their close evolutionary kinship with the ancient
asparagus family, and their bewildering diversity: Some 20,000 to 30,000 species
strong, the showy plants comprise some 8 percent of all flowering species
worldwide.
"Our analysis places orchids far toward the older end of the range that had
been postulated, suggesting the family was fairly young at the time of the
extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago," Ramírez says. "It appears,
based on our molecular clock analyses, that they began to flourish shortly
after the mass extinction at the so-called 'K/T boundary' between the Cretaceous
and Tertiary periods, which decimated many of Earth's species."
Orchids, unlike most flowering plants, package pollen in unique structures
called pollinia, which consist of relatively large masses of compact pollen
grains. The 15- to 20-million-year-old specimen of a worker bee carrying orchid
pollinia, recovered by a private collector in the Dominican Republic in 2000,
came to the attention of Ramírez and his colleagues at Harvard's Museum of
Comparative Zoology in 2005. While this particular species of stingless bee,
Proplebeia dominicana, is now extinct, the scientists' analysis of the shape and
configuration of its cargo of pollen places it firmly within one of five extant
subfamilies of orchids.
The specimen is one of just a few fossils known to illustrate directly a
plant-pollinator association. The specific placement of the pollen on the bee's
back not only confirms the grains were placed through active pollination -- as
opposed to a random encounter with an orchid -- but also sheds light on the
exact type and shape of orchid flower that produced the pollen tens of millions
of years ago.
By applying the so-called molecular clock method, the scientists also
estimated the age of the major branches of the orchid family. To their surprise, they
found that certain groups of modern orchids, including the highly prized
genus Vanilla, evolved very early during the rise of the plant family.
"This result is puzzling and fascinating at the same time because modern
species of Vanilla orchids are locally distributed throughout the tropical regions
of the world," says Ramírez. "But we know that tropical continents began to
split apart about 100 million years ago, and thus our estimates of 60 to 70
million years for the age of Vanilla suggest that tropical continents were still
experiencing significant biotic exchange much after their dramatic split."
Ramírez's co-authors on the Nature paper are Charles R. Marshall and Naomi E.
Pierce, both professors in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary
Biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Barbara Gravendeel of the
Nationaal Herbarium Nederland in Leiden, The Netherlands; and Rodrigo B. Singer of
the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto
Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director
Coevolution Institute
423 Washington St. 5th
San Francisco, CA 94111
415 362 1137
LDA at coevolution.org
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