The Nature of Things

You can see the grains of pollen on the wings of this Gulf Fritillary butterfly as it visits a hibiscus blossom. It will deliver this pollen and pick up more as it visits other blossoms on the shrub. It's important that the pollen be delivered today because the hibiscus blossom only remains open for one day.

I remember a song from my childhood called "Apple Blossom Time." It was a big hit, I think, for the female trio that sang it, the Andrews Sisters. I thought about that song when I looked at my apple tree this morning and now I've had the tune stuck in my head all day. Although the song lyric speaks of May as being "apple blossom time," March is definitely that time here in Southeast Texas. My old Ein Schmer apple tree is sanguine about late winter in our part of the world and so it is holding back some of its buds. It will open them slowly over the next week or so, thus just in case there is a late freeze, it won't lose all of its blossoms. It will still have more buds to open when the weather warms again. The bees are very happy about these blossoms. Both the honeybees and the native bees have been busy today visiting the apple blossoms and the blueberry blossoms that are open. The blueberries are much more profligate with their blossoms, more trusting...

Olivia Judson has a great piece in The New York Times today about the sex lives of plants. Plants, just like the rest of us, have, over millions of years, worked out strategies of sex and reproduction that successfully perpetuate their kind, but, as Judson points out, the plants' sex lives come with some unique obstacles. The most obvious obstacle is that the plant can't move around to find another of its kind to hook up with and so it has to depend on intermediaries. Flowers are the plants' vehicle for delivering their sperm and egg cells to the appropriate recipients and they essentially have two ways of getting those precious bits of matter to combine and make a new plant. One of their allies in reproduction is the wind. It is a bit quirky and unpredictable it is true, but about ten percent of flowering plants do use the wind to spread their pollen. Since the wind goes its own way and is a bit unreliable, wind-pollinated plants tend to produce huge quantities of pol...