Comment by marojejian
6 months ago
What most surprised me in this interview is, not only do plants increase sugar for 'efficient' pollinators, but:
>In contrast they respond to the sound of nectar-stealing non-pollinators by cutting back on sugar.
So there is some discrimination in their hearing.
Plants are our cousin eucaryotes, and they've been evolving as long as we animals have and so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them, we just don't know how to recognize it because it's so different from animal intelligence. There might even be something comparable to animal consciousness, not at the level of an individual plant, but more collectively, even including multiple species, whole ecosystems of plants and fungi together having an awareness and intelligence that can not only rival ours, but even transcend it, having lifespans in the thousands of years.
"... so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them"
This sounds like a really wild take. Just because something has been evolving for millions of years doesn't necessarily mean it's evolving information processing capabilities. It's patently obvious to me that the information processing capabilities of animals (eg. just vision alone) are far beyond those of plants.
Another possibility is that this is a non-conscious trait. Luring pollinators is an evolutionary advantage, but there is survival cost to giving nectar indiscriminately, so natural selection will favor plants that can mechanically differentiate between the two.
> Plants are our cousin eucaryotes, and they've been evolving as long as we animals have
That is true. And look how different we’ve become.
> and so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them
That’s quite a leap. I think precisely because plants and animals have evolved separately for so you can’t make that assumption. Maybe plants hasn’t not simply because they don’t need to, as a fundamental consequence of their differing physiology.
That is a leap, but its could be approached with open mind. We have learnt a lot in the last few decades that would have sounded like fantasy to someone 100 years ago.
This would make things quite complicated for vegans.
What is an example of a nectar-stealing non-pollinator? Doesn't anything rooting around in there end up moving around some pollen?
Some carpenter bees will bite straight through the flower bypassing the stamens and stigma.
Sometimes it's just an anatomy mismatch - like very small bee species and big open flowers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nectar_robbing
Take a look at the Flowerpiercers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowerpiercer
They're true parasites, piercing the flower to drink nectar without any chance of pollination.
The most common example are ants. Moths are often guilty of this as well.
I'd guess hummingbirds.
Some plants actually have evolved to be pollinated by hummingbirds, they have long thin tube shaped flowers that a hummingbird beak can travel up. The Sword-billed hummingbird has an incredibly long beak due to mutual evolution with flowers that grew deep tubes.
No, hummingbirds also pollinate some plants. Random link from a Google search: https://www.nps.gov/articles/hummingbirds.htm#:~:text=Hummin...
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