The relationship between flowers and insect pollinators is as old as time. It forms a crucial part of the novels of and beyond Shakespearean times. In the Indian pop culture, the flower-insect ties were solemnised in a 1982 Hindi film ‘Prem Rog’ starring actors Rishi Kapoor and Padmini Kolhapure, in a song whose lyrics can be translated as: The bumblebee fed the flower, and the prince took it away.
But now the climate change is altering this relationship that enables the sustenance of food chain as we know it, and has also influenced literature and pop culture in immeasurable proportions.
Flowers are ‘giving up’ on pollinators
According to a study published in the journal New Phytologist, flowers are now “giving up” on pollinators and evolving to be less attractive due to decline in the number of insects.
The researchers found that flowers of field pansies near Paris are 10 per cent smaller and produce 20 per cent less nectar than flowers growing in the same fields 20 to 30 years ago.
“Our study shows that pansies are evolving to give up on their pollinators,” Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research said in an official statement.
“They are evolving towards self-pollination, where each plant reproduces with itself, which works in the short term but may well limit their capacity to adapt to future environmental changes.”
How flowers are evolving in ‘real time’?
Plants produce nectar for insects. In return, insects transport pollen between plants. This mutually beneficial relationship has formed over millions of years of co-evolution.
But now plants are producing less nectar, the research has found. This means that insects are becoming less attracted towards plants.
“Our results show that the effects of pollinator declines are not easily reversible, because plants have already started to change. Conservation measures are therefore urgently needed to halt and reverse pollinator declines,” lead author Samson Acoca-Pidolle said in an official statement.
A report in the Guardian cited Dr Philip Donkersley of the Lancaster University saying that the phenomenon described in the above study shows “evolution happening in real time”.
“The fact that these flowers are changing their strategy in response to decreasing pollinator abundance is quite startling. This research shows a plant undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has been around for only 50 years,” Donkersley, who was not associated with the study, said.
The world has lost 5 per cent to 10 per cent of all insect species in the last 150 years — or between 250,000 and 500,000 species, according to a February 2020 study in the journal Biological Conservation.
The global insect population is declining at an unprecedented rate of up to 2 per cent per year, the study had said.
Insects are described as “the fabric” that tethers together every freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem across the planet.
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Insects pollinate more than 75 per cent of global crops, a service valued at up to $577 billion per year, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
(With inputs from agencies)
