Most plants are pollinated through bees, but one plant, Marcgravia evenia, which grows in the Cuban rainforest, has it a little harder: it has to attract on-the-go bats in the dark of night.
Instead of using their eyes, the flying mammals orient themselves with echolocation: they send out ultrasound waves and listen closely to which sounds echo back.
According to a study published Friday in the journal Science, a team of British, German and Canadian researchers have shown that this newly-discovered plant that has evolved to reflect back especially audible ultrasound waves. Marcgravia evenia achieves this through concave, spherically shaped leaves.
The bats located the feeder in half the time when it was attached to a dish-shaped leaf. And that was good for the bats and the vine.
“For the plants, it increases the success of pollination,” Dr. Simon said. “For the bats, it’s good because it helps them find the flowers faster — they have to make several hundred visits to flowers every night.”
The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science, is one of the first to focus on the evolution of echo-acoustic signals in plants.
Several hundred species of plants in the Neotropics rely on about 40 nectar-feeding bat species for pollination, Dr. Simon said.
He and his colleagues expect that they will find other plant species that are similarly adept at acoustic signaling for their bat pollinators.
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