[Pollinator] Marine invertebrates pollinate seagrasses?

[Peter Bernhardt]

Dear Justin:

Thank you for sharing this link with me.  Let's share it with others who
will be interested.  Your link (below) will take them to the original paper
in the journal, Nature, so they can see how experiments were conducted to
test the hypotheses

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12980

The experiments are simple but convincing because night-blooming sea
grasses usually flower when the tide is out reducing both depth and wave
action in the "sea grass meadows." Of course, I've been fooled before.
Yes, I remember the pollination-by-springtails (Collembola) hoax but this
 does look like the real thing this time.  How do I know?  During my years
in the Plant Cell Biology Research Century, under Bruce Knox, part of the
lab worked on the pollination of sea grasses.  Bruce did some work but the
majority was done by Sophie Ducker and Dr. Cameron McConchie (spelling?).
Bruce and Sophie died years ago.  Cameron has retired from Australian CSIRO
and we've lost touch.  He was the authority on sea grass pollination until
his bosses made him focus on avocado and macadamia nuts.

Cameron wrote a review about sea grass pollination (containing some of his
own research on freshwater species) and it was published in "Pollination
'84,," a symposium held at the U. of Melbourne.  The pollen in gelatin
system he reviewed in some genera is described in the Nature paper.  Sea
grasses like our Atlantic Zostera, however, have thread-like grains lacking
the hard-stiff outer wall of the grain (no sporopollenin) and their
cellulose walls are flexible riding with the current.  The description of
both sea grass systems is available to you as I have the "Pollination '84"
book in my library at work.  I've also stained pollen walls (exine) with
Auramine O, but it has been years.  Notice they used standard fluorescence
microscopy, as in our lab, to detect pollen tubes on the stigmas as we do
(and Cameron did).  What I find interesting is that the best studied
pollinators appear to be immature or larval stages.  I don't think there
are any confirmed examples of pollination by larval insects on dry earth.

Here's an anecdote to go with it.  Tropical Australia is quite a good place
for different sea grass species.  Cameron had a number of photos of the
female flowers back then and I commented on the bright color (red?) of the
stigmas.  I suggested that they may be attracting something (fish?) but
Sophie Ducker treated the idea with contempt in her usual
"I-know-more-than-you-do-because-I-was-educated-in-Austria-you-American-scum-way."
 Ah, those were the good old days.

Peter
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