Magnolias Are So Old That They're Pollinated by Beetles, Not Bees

teh_klev 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	dr_dshiv an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The desperation of the immobile

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chabes 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators

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rob74 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	317070 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	fyhn 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I noticed these for the first time earlier this summer. Incredible insects! They really do give a hummingbird impression.
	▲	neutronicus 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Finding hawk moth caterpillars on my tomato plant was one of the bigger wtfs of my adult life
	▲	VMG 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		rare instance where the German name Taubenschwänzchen ('little dove-tail') is nicer than the English name
	▲	barrenko 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Very common around my mom's house.

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FerretFred 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

	▲	rantallion 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Seeds are not gametes. While your dog may help spread the seeds, they are not assisting in the sexual reproduction itself.

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pfdietz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And by wind. The major staple crops are all wind pollinated.

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williamdclt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

mosquitoes too, though it pains me to give them credit for anything

	▲	nkrisc 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, all mosquitoes drink nectar, and only females of some species drink blood.

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danielheath 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And... wolves?

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....

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broeng 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And olive trees have genders, with the male pollinating the surrounding females.

	▲	BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's pretty common in plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioecy

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cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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mallomarmeasle 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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/

	▲	cmrdporcupine 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I've wondered about just really nasty ass stinky fresh manure around the base of each tree. That would attract flies. Probably a flush of nitrogen at exactly the wrong time tho. Most plants respond to that by pushing excess green growth instead of flowering and fruit set.

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indoordin0saur an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You grow these commercially? Always wondering where I can buy good quality ones when they're in season (in NYC area)

	▲	Alex3917 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Email me and I can connect you with some. There is a FB group for folks growing them in the NYC area, plus a list of all the parks where they are planted.
	▲	cmrdporcupine 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, from those trees we basically only get enough for personal consumption because fruit bearing (so far) is so unreliable. Also, southern Ontario.

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adm4 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the little beetle that could, and pawpaw's are self-incompatible. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba#Pollination

	▲	cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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

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palata 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ants as well

	▲	Foobar8568 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I was about to say ants with passion fruit flowers.

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mvidal01 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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-...

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baxtr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What’s the best security control against this robbery?!

	▲	rags2riches an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is what the shape of the flower and its placement of the stamen and pistils are all about.
	▲	adm4 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		great idea... How do you make sure there is an exchange.

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TacticalMalice 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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adrian_b 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	xipho an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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...

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palata 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.

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Diogenesian 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rob74 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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)?

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ggus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	lanstin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As is so often the case with biology on earth.

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datakan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Jumping spiders are smarter

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Diogenesian 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are they? They are smarter than web-spinning spiders but I've never read anything suggesting they are smarter than bees.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3357

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datakan 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	neutronicus 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That’s definitely the premise Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time haha

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nephihaha 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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WhyIsItAlwaysHN 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Spiders are not insects though https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...

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adrian_b 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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WhyIsItAlwaysHN an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	palata 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is explicitly a thread about arthropods, though. Quote from above: > they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod

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cubefox 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But they are arthropods.

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actionfromafar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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yubblegum 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Now I am musing about spider nightmares.

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oneeyedpigeon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thousands of tiny humans crawling all over you...

	▲	amarant 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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?

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ta8903 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a reason the average spider sleepwalks into 8 human mouths a year.

	▲	yubblegum 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You really didn't have to share this.

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globular-toast 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	pfdietz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You should plant clover. You'll get plenty of bees.

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cachius 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Living fossils, like Ginkos

And Equisetum/Horsetail/Schachtelhalm

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Mistletoe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

https://imgur.com/a/OAHQCW4

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tmoertel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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Sharlin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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mvidal01 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have mountain mint growing in my yard and every pollinator imaginable goes to that plant.

	▲	HelloMcFly 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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!

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vidarh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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lorreyfum an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not old, evolved. Bees were going extinct, remember?