Evolution of waving in flowers equivalent to women suggestively wiggling hips

Flowers blowing from side to side in the wind are the plant equivalent of women wiggling their hips suggestively at men, reasearchers have found.
Observations of sea campion have shown that flowers which wave at passing insects have a better chance of getting pollinated than those which stay still.
The flower's 'wobble' makes them more attractive to pollinators and explains why many plants risk growing long stalks which can get damaged when the wind blows.
Colour, smell and bribery through the production of nectar have all been recognised as lures for insects but scientists have only just woken up to the wobble.
The role the length of stalk grown for the flower was previously thought to be important just in the dispersal of seeds but is now realised to be crucial to pollination levels.
Dr John Warren, of Aberystwyth University, compared evolution of waving in flowers to women suggestively wiggling their hips.
Flowers that waved in the breeze were found to be more successful at producing seed than those with the short stalks, the study of sea campion, Silene martima, showed.
But there was an optimum length for the species because those that grew the longest proved "too wobbly" for insects to keep hold of.
Dr Warren said there was another trade-off between the thickness of the stalk. Thin stalks meant the flowers could wave more effectively at the insects and attracted more of them but thick stalks gave the creatures a more secure landing platform.
"Flowers that don't move much are less attractive to insects than those that wobble," he said. "It's an element of insect attraction that we've overlooked.
"There's an optimum waviness. The insects have to be able to stay on the flowers long enough to successfully pollinate the plants."
He added: "There is a downside to waving to attract so many insects in that it increases the chances of the plants getting sexually transmitted diseases."
Observations of sea campion on the beaches of Aberystwyth showed that flowers needed insects to be on them for at least a minute for successful levels of pollination.
An accumulative total of two minutes or more was found to be the ideal minimum and resulted in the greatest quantity of seeds being produced.
"Although the importance of flower stalk in dispersing seeds has long been known the results presented here strongly suggest that its adaptive significance as a mechanism for attracting pollinating insects by facilitating floral-waving has been overlooked," the researchers said in their report, published in the journal Evolutionary Biology.
"Mobile flowers are visited more frequently and by more species than are the stable flowers. Although average visit durations were less in mobile flowers this was more than compensated for by the increase number of visits."
Dr Warren started the research project after observing sea campion floweres waving in the wind while lying on a beach at Aberystwyth.
"I was lying on the beach at my daughter's birthday party watching the flowers blowing in the wind. They were blowing violently and I wondered why they bothered to have stalks," he said.

Comments

[Steve Bush]

or maybe the insects just didnt recognise the abnormally immobilised flowers and Doc has a fertile imagination.