Australian Flowers Bloom Red Because of Honeyeaters

Jessica Lim

Author: Sarah Zielinski
Published: March 6, 2014

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/australian-flowers-bloom-red-because-honeyeaters

Summary:

     The honeyeaters are a big and diverse type of birds that mainly feed on nectar from flowering plants, in Australia. In order for the flowers to reproduce, in return for feeding the bird, the bird carries the pollen to other plants, allowing fertilization. In effect these plants have "converged on a similar method of drawing honeyeaters to them". The common method that they use is to create flowers with certain colors that will attract the birds attention and lure them in. Researchers studied and examined 234 native flowering plants "and used a computer algorithm to convert the variety of wavelengths reflected by a flower into a single value that could be compared to the color vision system of a bird pollinator." Knowing that red or violet in wavelength attract and stand out to honeyeaters, researchers found that half of the studied flowering plants, that are bird-pollinated, were all the color red, even though they were all different flowering plants. This shows that they all converged into creating a similar pigment in the color red, to attract bird-pollinators.

Connection:

     This directly connects to what we were talking about in class; how birds are attracted to the color red, and so that's why most of the bird-pollinated flowering plants are red. This article gives more evidence to that fact. This article also connects to fertilization and pollination because the flowers need to attract the attention of the birds in order to have their eggs fertilized, and in order to spread their pollen, to fertilize other eggs and reproduce. Also this is an example of animal-pollination, which is one way flowers spread there pollen other than wind-pollination. The animal, in this case a honeyeater, not only takes nectar from the flower, but pollen also attaches to the bird, and as the bird takes nectar from another flower the pollen is transferred down to the ovary and fertilizes the eggs.