The Guardian had this, this week, the top ten science stories of 2023. Interesting, if somewhat gloomy. 5 "The hottest year on record"; 9 "Bird decline linked to herbicides and pesticides" and 2 "AI finally starting to feel like AI" (it's not AI! - wbs) aren't really good stories though necessary. 3 "Girls doing hard math", is, as is 6 "a new therapy for sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia" but for my money one of the most interesting science stories of 2023 was the following from a few weeks back.
Flowers are "giving up on" pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them as insect numbers decline, researchers have said.
A study has found the flowers of field pansies growing near Paris are 10% smaller and produce 20% less nectar than flowers growing in the same fields 20 to 30 years ago. They are also less frequently visited by insects.
"Our study shows that pansies are evolving to give up on their pollinators," said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, one of the study's authors and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. "They are evolving towards self-pollination, where each plant reproduces with itself, which works in the short term but may well limit their capacity to adapt to future environmental changes."
That's an incredibly short period in evolutionary terms, isn't it?
"This is a particularly exciting finding as it shows evolution happening in real time," said Dr Philip Donkersley, from Lancaster University, who was not involved in the study.
"The fact that these flowers are changing their strategy in response to decreasing pollinator abundance is quite startling. This research shows a plant undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has been around for only 50 years.
"Although most research has been done in Europe and North America, we know that pollinator declines are a global phenomenon. These results may just be the tip of the iceberg: areas with far greater plant diversity will likely have many more examples of wild plants changing their pollination strategies in response to a lack of pollinators."
Not unprecedented:
Similar processes can be seen in invasive populations that need to adapt new ecological niches. Populations of foxglove have evolved to be pollinated by bumblebees in Europe. However, 200 years ago they were introduced to Costa Rica and Colombia, and they have since changed the shape of their flowers so they can be pollinated by hummingbirds, researchers found.
So there we are. Evolution, literally, playing out in front of our eyes.
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