Most living angiosperms (flowering plants) are pollinated by insects, and the new reconstruction of the ancestral pollination mode of angiosperms suggests that their most recent common ancestor was also insect pollinated.
“Pollination is a fundamental ecological process that has influenced the diversification of many seed plant families throughout evolutionary history,” said Macquarie University Ph.D. student Ruby Stephens and colleagues.
“Both gymnosperms and angiosperms depend on pollination to reproduce sexually, with pollen transfer effected by insects, vertebrates, wind or water as vectors.”
“Shifts between different pollinators or pollination modes are often implicated in the speciation of closely related plants, and in the angiosperms pollination shifts have driven the evolution of the vast array of floral forms present today.”
“Precisely how the first angiosperms were pollinated, and how pollination modes have evolved through time, remains a key question in angiosperm macroevolution,” they added.
“The majority of angiosperms are pollinated by animals, especially insects (e.g. bees, flies, wasps, moths, butterflies, beetles and thrips) but also vertebrates (e.g. birds, bats, lizards and small mammals).”
“Indeed, although some flowers self-pollinate, up to a third of angiosperms set no seed at all without animal pollination.”
“However, abiotic pollination by wind or water also occurs in many diverse plant lineages, and wind pollination is estimated to have evolved at least 65 times across the angiosperms.”
In their research, the scientists used a state-of-the-art evolutionary tree of all angiosperms, unveiling data on what pollinates 1,160 species across all major angiosperm families.
“The evolutionary tree shows us what plant families evolved when,” Stephens said.
“By running different models, we can map backwards from what pollinates a plant in the present, to what might have pollinated the ancestor of that plant in…
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