Are long stems on flowers an adaptation that encourages bat pollination?

Flowers that are pollinated by bats tend to have long stems that make them stand out from the surrounding foliage. New research published in New Phytologist reveals the evolutionary advantage that this characteristic provides to plants to ensure that they are discovered by bats.

In simple backgrounds lacking foliage, bats showed no significant difference in the time it took them to find flowers with long versus short stems, but in complex backgrounds (with arrays of leaves and flowers), bats took nearly twice as much time to locate short-stemmed flowers.

Investigators hypothesize that flowers located away from the surrounding foliage likely help bats to distinguish floral echoes from background clutter during echolocation. Therefore, long stems represent an adaptation to aid bat pollination.

“This work suggests long stems make bat-flowers more ‘visible’ to bats in the same way that bright red petals help hummingbirds find their flowers,” said corresponding author Nathan Muchhala, PhD, of the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/NPH.20075

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About the Journal
New Phytologist is a leading international journal focusing on high quality, original research across the broad spectrum of plant sciences, from intracellular processes through to global environmental change. The journal is owned by the New Phytologist Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of plant science.

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