Most plants are upstanding citizen , fairly trading nectar for pollenation service from louse and other animals . Some of them , though — an reckon 4 to 6 percent of all flower plants — don’t hold up their end of the transaction . They lure pollinators in with the promise of food for thought , protection or evensex , but do n’t deliver on it .
The smearwort ( Aristolochia rotunda ) , an herbaceous plant feel around the Mediterranean , is one of these liars . It befool yield flies into enter its flush and then traps them there , getting pollinated without propose any reward . But the plant set a twist on this magic trick by chouse another cheat . The species of fly ball that the smearwort tricks are thieves themselves , kleptoparasitesthat assay out and slip from the putting to death of insect predators like spider and praying mantises .
How does the smearwort catch a stealer ? Scientists used to think that its flowers imitate the flies ’ nut - lay site , but a newstudysuggests that the truth is a little stranger . The plant actually appears to mime the chemical cues that pull the flies to their badly - gotten meals .
When some insects are attacked , they relinquish chemical from their scent glands that repel predators and signal danger to other members of their species . These chemicals are what the tent flap follow to the kill site that they rob , and as German biologist Birgit Oelschlägeldiscovered , they also share some components with the scent released by the smearwort ’s flowers . When Oelschlägel and her team isolated some of these chemical compound , they found that same one drew the fly to both pertly - kill bugs and the smearwort . In other row , the plant promises a corpse that is n’t really there in order of magnitude to exploit a fly ball that showed up so it could steal nutrient from a wanderer . Ai n’t nature grand ?
