Posted by admin | Posted in News about Flowers | Posted on 12-12-2006
Some brightly-coloured flowers appear to use a green glow to attract bees and bats to pollinate them, according to a study published yesterday.
To discover this signalling system, never before seen in plants, Prof Francisco GarcÃa-Carmona and colleagues at the University of Murcia in Spain extracted and purified the pigments of Mirabilis jalapa flowers.
The flowers, found in South America, are also known as four-o’clocks, marvel of Peru and beauty of the night.
The team found that the flowers, which open in the afternoon, rely on fluorescence, so emitting green light rather than just reflecting it, a signalling system recorded before only in budgerigars and the mantis shrimp.
They report in the journal Nature finding that the fluorescence emitted by one pigment, a yellow betaxanthin, is absorbed by another pigment, a violet betacyanin, to create a green fluorescent pattern on the petals.
“Visible fluorescent patterns in flowers opens up the study of the relationships between plants and pollinators. To date fluorescence has not been considered a signal,” said Prof GarcÃa-Carmona.
Source: www.telegraph.com.uk