[Pollinator] Switching Pollinators

[Ladadams at aol.com]

NY Times:

January 26, 2010

Observatory


Plant Switches Pollinators When  Caterpillars Strike


By _HENRY  FOUNTAIN_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/henry_fountain/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 


It is not a perfect situation, the  relationship between coyote tobacco and 
hawkmoths.


Sure, the hawkmoth does a good job of  pollinating the plant, Nicotiana 
attenuata, which grows in the Western  United States and flowers at night. But 
the hawkmoth has this habit of  leaving behind its eggs, which develop into 
caterpillars that like nothing  better than to eat the plant.


So N. attenuata strikes back in a novel way,  according to scientists at 
the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in  Jena, Germany. As they 
_describe in Current Biology_ (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/) ,  it shifts 
the time of its flowering to mornings and attracts a different  pollinator, 
a hummingbird.


"Nobody had actually noticed this before,"  said Ian T. Baldwin, director 
of the institute and senior author of the  Current Biology paper. He said 
Danny Kessler, the lead author, was taking  photographs one day of a plant that 
happened to be attacked by caterpillars.  "Out of the blue, the flowers 
opened in the morning," he  said.


Munching caterpillars produce oral  secretions that "activate a whole 
series of defense responses," Dr. Baldwin  said, including the production of 
toxins and protease inhibitors that  decrease the caterpillars' digestive 
ability. The change in flowering time,  he said, "is a fourth major group of 
events that are activated by  caterpillar attack."


By shifting pollinators, the plant reduces  the damage from hawkmoths. But 
why doesn't it eliminate hawkmoth  pollination? Probably because the 
hawkmoth is a better pollinator than  hummingbirds - it travels farther and visits 
more plants. "The tobacco plant  gets superior pollination services out of 
the hawkmoth," Dr. Baldwin  said.



_Copyright  2010_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)  The New York Times Company





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Laurie Davies Adams
Executive  Director
Pollinator Partnership 
423 Washington Street, 5th  floor
San Francisco, CA  94111
415-362-1137
LDA at pollinator.org

_www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 

_www.nappc.org_ (http://www.nappc.org/) 

National Pollinator Week is June 21-27, 2010. 
Beecome  involved at _www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 
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