The finding is thought to be a first of its kind on record.įascinated by this likely case of floral mimicry, scientists are now left wondering how this fungus evolved to deceive-and to do it so well. “This is the only example that we know of, anywhere on planet Earth, where the false flower is all fungal,” says Kerry O’Donnell, a microbiologist at the U.S. xyrophilum hijacks an as yet unknown aspect of the plant’s operations to host pseudoflowers made entirely of fungal tissue-potentially tricking pollinators to disperse its spores rather than pollen from the plant’s flowers. The fungus, Fusarium xyrophilum, infects an Xyris plant and sterilizes it to block the plant’s own blooms. Instead they were mimics-the product of a fungus that Wurdack, who works at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues recently described. And the yellow-eyed grasses-which belong to a genus called Xyris-had not made them.
Digging through relevant botanical literature, Wurdack learned what was actually going on: The orange oddities were not really flowers at all. On subsequent trips, he observed more examples of the strange phenomenon. “I just sort of filed it away as an incidental thing,” Wurdack says. Unlike the species’ typical blooms, they were a more orange shade of yellow, tightly clustered and spongy in texture.
On a collection trip to Guyana in 2006, botanist Kenneth Wurdack was strolling along an airstrip at Kaieteur National Park when he noticed something unusual about the flowers on two species of yellow-eyed grasses.
0 kommentar(er)
