SCIENCE LAB SCENICS : PLANT PLANS

IF a plant wants to reproduce, there are a number of tricks it can use to lure a pollinator insect. It can display gaudily colored flowers to catch their eye or appeal to the nose with sweet or pungent scents.

Then there are the cycads. These 250-million-year-old tropical plants look like palms and reproduce with structures resembling pine cones. To secure their next generation, they get hot.

Their warm glow at dusk tempts beetles with unique infrared-sensing antennae in a relationship so ancient it may be at the basis of all pollination as we know it, according to a study published in the journal Science.

'' If you think about how the ancient planet looked when plants and animals first started to communicate, there were other signals that were important,'' said Wendy Valencia-Montoya, an evolutionary biologist in Harvard University in Massachusetts and an author of the study.

Some plants, including the pink lotus and the titan arum, can heat up to temperatures of 60 to nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit [ 33 to 50 degrees Celsius] above their surroundings, especially when it's cold.

Botanists mainly thought that this helped these plants boost the potency of their scent signals or offer pollinators a cozy refuge.

But Dr. Valencia-Montoya had a hunch that heat could be a beacon. She tried enticing beetles with fake 3-D printed temperature-controlled cycad cones - with no cycadlike scent, color or texture - placed next to real cycads.

The dopes attracted hundreds of pollinators.

This Master Lab Publishing continues to Part [ 2 ]. The World Students Society thanks Sofia Quaglia.