By Elizabeth Pennisi
The agricultural pests known as plant bugs can be a farmer’s worst enemy. These winged insects—the size of a pea or smaller—suck the sap from apples, lettuce, and other crops, causing millions of dollars in damages globally each year.
A Costa Rican flower has turned this foe into friend, however, according to a new study. One species of the so-called arum plant has evolved to attract a species of plant bug instead of a typical beetle pollinator, helping them spread their pollen far and wide. The find is the first known example of a plant harnessing plant bugs to help them reproduce.
“This is a totally new finding for ecology and evolutionary biology,” says Zong-Xin Ren, an evolutionary ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Kunming Institute of Botany who was not involved in the work. The study “shows that flowering plants have evolved specialized relationships with pollinators outside of the usual suspects of bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds,” adds Jeff Ollerton, a Denmark-based evolutionary biologist and author of a book about pollinators.
The find comes thanks to a fortuitous all-nighter. Florian Etl, a graduate student working with evolutionary biologist Jürg Schönenberger at the University Vienna, was investigating the role of beetles in pollinating several related flowering plants in the lowland rainforests of Costa Rica. The plants look a lot like the calla lilies often sold by florists; in that the flower is a tall stalk partially surrounded by a large, modified leaf—white or purple in calla lilies, but usually green in these Costa Rican plants.
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