Pollinated by bats. Types of pollination of plants. The special structure of the inflorescence

Pollination

What is pollination? Bloom- this is the state of plants from the beginning of the opening of flowers to the drying of their stamens and petals . During flowering, pollination of plants occurs.

Pollinationcalled the transfer of pollen from the stamens to the stigma of the pistil. If pollen is transferred from the stamens of one flower to the stigma of the pistil of another flower, then cross pollination . If pollen falls on the stigma of the pistil of the same flower, this is self-pollination .

Cross pollination. With cross-pollination, two options are possible: pollen is transferred to flowers located on the same plant, pollen is transferred to flowers of another plant. In the latter case, it must be borne in mind that pollination occurs only between individuals of the same species!

Cross-pollination can be carried out by wind, water (these plants grow in water or near water: hornwort, naiad, vallisneria, elodea ), insects, and in tropical countries also birds and bats.

Cross-pollination is biologically more appropriate, because the offspring, combining the characteristics of both parents, can better adapt to the environment. Self-pollination has its advantages: it does not depend on external conditions, and the offspring stably retains parental characteristics. For example, if yellow tomatoes are grown, then next year, using their seeds, you can again get the same yellow tomatoes ( tomatoes are usually self-pollinators). Most plants cross-pollinate, although there are few strictly cross-pollinated plants (e.g., rye), more often cross-pollination is combined with self-pollination, which further increases the fitness of plants for survival.

Flower pollination types: self-pollination, cross-pollination

Wind pollinated plants. Plants whose flowers are pollinated by the wind are called wind pollinated . Usually their inconspicuous flowers are collected in compact inflorescences, for example, in a complex spike, or in panicles. They produce a huge amount of small, light pollen. Wind pollinated plants often grow in large groups. Among them are herbs. (timothy grass, bluegrass, sedge) and shrubs and trees (hazel, alder, oak, poplar, birch) . Moreover, these trees and shrubs bloom at the same time as the leaves bloom (or even earlier).

In wind-pollinated plants, the stamens usually have a long filament and carry the anther outside the flower. The stigmas of the pistils are also long, "shaggy" - to catch dust particles flying in the air. These plants also have certain adaptations to ensure that pollen is not wasted, but rather falls on the stigmas of flowers of its own species. Many of them bloom by the hour: some bloom early in the morning, others in the afternoon.

Insect pollinated plants. Insects (bees, bumblebees, flies, butterflies, beetles) are attracted by sweet juice - nectar, which is secreted by special glands - nectaries. Moreover, they are located in such a way that the insect, getting to the nectaries, must touch the anthers and stigma of the pistil. Insects feed on nectar and pollen. And some (bees) even store them for the winter.

Therefore, the presence of nectaries is an important feature of an insect pollinated plant. In addition, their flowers are usually bisexual, their pollen is sticky with outgrowths on the shell to cling to the insect's body. Insects find flowers by a strong smell, by bright colors, by large flowers or inflorescences.

In a number of plants, nectar, which attracts insects, is available to many of them. So on blooming poppies, jasmine, buzulnik, nivyanika you can see bees, and bumblebees, and butterflies, and beetles.

But there are plants that have adapted to a particular pollinator. However, they may have a special structure of the flower. Carnation, with its long corolla, is pollinated only by butterflies, whose long proboscis can reach the nectar. Only bumblebees can pollinate flaxseed, snapdragon : under their weight, the lower petals of the flowers are bent and the insect, reaching the nectar, collects pollen with its shaggy body. The stigma of the pistil is located so that the pollen brought by the bumblebee from another flower must remain on it.

Flowers can smell attractive to different insects or smell particularly strong at different times of the day. Many white or light flowers smell especially strongly in the evening and at night - they are pollinated by moths. Bees are attracted to sweet, “honey” smells, and flies are often not very pleasant smells for us: many umbrella plants smell like this. (snyt, cow parsnip, kupyr) .

Scientists have conducted studies that have shown that insects see colors in a special way and each species has its own preferences. It is not for nothing that in nature all shades of red reign among daytime flowers (but in the dark red is almost indistinguishable), and blue and white are much less.

Why so many devices? In order to have a better chance that pollen will not be wasted, but will fall on the pistil of a flower of a plant of the same species.

Having studied the structure and features of the flower, we can assume which animals will pollinate it. So, fragrant tobacco flowers have a very long tube of fused petals. Therefore, only insects with a long proboscis can reach the nectar. The flowers are white, well visible in the dark. They smell especially strong in the evening and at night. Pollinators - hawk moths, night butterflies, which have a proboscis up to 25 cm long.

The largest flower in the world - rafflesia - painted red with dark spots. It smells like rotten meat. But for flies there is no smell more pleasant. They pollinate this wonderful, rare flower.

Self-pollination. Majority self-pollinating plants are crops (peas, flax, oats, wheat, tomato) , although there are self-pollinating plants among the wild ones.

Some of the flowers are already pollinated in bud. If you open a pea bud, you can see that the pistil is covered with orange pollen. In flax, pollination takes place in an open flower. The flower blooms early in the morning and after a few hours the petals fall off. During the day, the air temperature rises and the filaments twist, the anthers touch the stigma, burst, and the pollen spills out on the stigma. Self-pollinating plants, including linen, can be pollinated and cross-pollinated. Conversely, under unfavorable conditions, self-pollination can occur in cross-pollinated plants.

Cross-pollinated plants in the flower have devices that prevent self-pollination: the anthers mature and shed pollen before the pistil develops; the stigma is located above the anthers; pistils and stamens can develop in different flowers and even on different plants (dioecious).

artificial pollination. In certain cases, a person carries out artificial pollination, that is, he himself transfers pollen from the stamens to the stigma of the pistils. Artificial pollination is carried out for different purposes: to breed new varieties, to increase the yield of some plants. In calm weather, a person pollinates wind-pollinated crops. (corn), and in cold or wet weather - insect pollinated plants (sunflower) . Both wind- and insect-pollinated plants are artificially pollinated; both cross- and self-pollinated.

Interactive lesson simulator. (Complete all the tasks of the lesson)

1 group of ways:Biotic pollination

Zoophyllia. 1. Most often found entomophily. The evolution of pollinating insects and flowering plants was of a conjugated character => both of them have mutual adaptations, sometimes so narrow that the plant is not able to exist without its pollinator and vice versa. Entomophilous flowers are easy to distinguish, as insects are attracted to the flower: 1) color; 2) smell; 3) food (nectar and pollen). In addition, 4) some insects seek refuge in flowers at night or from rain (the temperature inside the flower is several degrees higher); 5) some chalcid wasps reproduce in flowers (blastophage wasps and figs).

Signs of entomophilous flowers:

1) brightly colored and therefore clearly visible;

2) small flowers are collected in inflorescences that are clearly visible;

3) secrete a lot of nectar;

4) have a smell;

5) not very much pollen is formed, it is sticky, large, with an uneven surface of the exine;

6) often a flower has a specific structure adapted to a particular pollinator or group of pollinators (for example, flowers with a long corolla tube are pollinated by butterflies or bumblebees).

Color. Insects navigate where the nectar is located using the color of the corolla (spots, stripes, strokes, often not visible to humans, but visible to insects, since they also see in the ultraviolet spectrum).

The color vision of insects is different from that of humans.

The color of the corolla also has geographical patterns. In the tropics, red and orange colors are more common, in mid-latitudes a lighter color of the corolla is more common.

Coloration is also related to habitat. In the forest - lighter, on the edge and open places - diverse.

Smell. Most insects, in particular Hymenoptera, prefer aromatic smells due to essential oils (lilac, carnation, rose, etc.).

Aminoid odors due to the presence of substances with an amino group (NH 2) (elder, mountain ash, hawthorn). Such smells attract beetles, flies and some other insects.

Indoloid odors due to the substance - indole (the cadaverous smell of decaying meat). Flowers with this smell are more common in tropical forests (rafflesia, many aroids). Attract flies. The source of the smell in this case is not nectar, but special oils secreted by the petals.

Thus, the color of the perianth is a distant signal, and the smell is a near signal for pollinators.

The main groups of insect pollinators:

1) Hymenoptera (bees, bumblebees, less often - wasps);

2) Diptera (flies) - visit less specialized flowers;

3) Lepidoptera (butterflies) - diurnal (visit mainly red and yellow flowers) and nocturnal (white flowers);

4) Coleoptera (beetles) - they mainly collect pollen as a food product, often do not cross-pollinate, but self-pollinate (for example, bronze on a wild rose). Sometimes beetles can eat the ovary and ovules.

2. ornithophyllia - pollinated by birds. It is typical for tropical regions, less often for subtropics (eucalyptus, aloe, cacti, etc.).

Signs of ornithophilous flowers:

1) no smell! because birds have a weak sense of smell;

2) the color of the corolla is mainly red and orange, less often blue or purple (birds easily distinguish these last two colors, unlike insects);

3) the nectar is weakly concentrated and there is a lot of it (unlike insect-pollinated plants).

Birds often do not sit on a flower, but pollinate it on the fly, hovering near it.

Main pollinators:

1) tropics of the New World (America) - hummingbirds;

2) the tropics of the Old World - honeysuckers, nectaries, flower girls;

3) Australia - Lori parrots.

3. Chiropterophilia Pollination by bats. This way, mainly tropical trees and shrubs are pollinated, less often - herbs (baobab, banana, some cacti).

Bats visit flowers at night. => Signs of flowers pollinated by bats:

1) fluorescent white or yellow-green color, may be brownish, less often - purple or white;

2) a specific smell, reminiscent of the secretions and secretions of bats ("stale");

3) flowers bloom in the evening or at night;

4) large flowers hang on long stalks from branches (for example, baobab) or develop directly on tree trunks (caulifloria) (for example, cocoa).

One of the plants pollinated by bats is the mango. Flowers and fruits of wild mango stink very strongly and attract bats (and as fruit distributors as well). When breeding mango cultivars, they tried to get rid of the smell of fruits. To some extent, this was successful, but the specific aftertaste still remained.

2 group of ways:abiotic pollination.

1.Anemophilia - Pollination by wind.

In the temperate forest zone, approximately 20% of plants are wind pollinated. In open spaces (in the steppe, in the desert, in the polar regions), this percentage is much higher.

Signs of anemophilous flowers:

1) the flowers are small, inconspicuous, greenish or yellowish, often without a perianth at all or a perianth in the form of scales and films;

2) small flowers are collected in many-flowered inflorescences, which increases the chances of pollination. A very characteristic inflorescence with a dangling axis, adapted to wind pollination - an earring;

3) anthers often on long filaments, swaying, hanging from the flower;

4) very large, often feathery stigmas protrude beyond the flower;

5) a lot of pollen is produced, it is small, dry, smooth, and may have additional devices that facilitate flight (for example, air sacs);

6) very often the flowers are dioecious, and the plants are monoecious or dioecious.

Wind-pollinated plants often grow in large clusters, which increases the chances of pollination (birch grove, oak forest, bamboo thickets). Many wind-pollinated trees and shrubs in our zone bloom in early spring before the leaves bloom or simultaneously with their appearance (aspen, hazel, poplar, birch, oak, etc.).

2. hydrophilia - Pollination with water. It is rare, since water is not a typical environment for flowering plants. Flowering secondarily switched to an aquatic lifestyle. In many of them, growing in water, the flowers rise above the water and are pollinated by insects (water lily) or wind (reed).

Flowers in hydrophilic plants are immersed in water, less often they float on the surface of the water (in the latter case, other methods of pollination are possible).

Signs of hydrophilic flowers:

1) usually small and inconspicuous, solitary or collected in small inflorescences;

2) flowers are often unisexual (for example, vallisneria, elodea);

3) anthers have a thin wall, are devoid of endothecium, often filamentous in shape, in some plants they are braided around the stigma and pollen immediately falls on it and quickly germinates;

4) pollen is devoid of exine (because it floats in the water column and does not need protection from drying out).

In aquatic plants, vegetative reproduction prevails over seed reproduction, since water is not a particularly favorable environment for pollination.

Two species of bats visit the flowers of the Cardon cactus in California. Representatives of one species (long-nosed) are highly specialized pollinators of flowers, representatives of the other are insectivorous bats, known for their ability to hear the movements of large insects and scorpions. According to research by scientists from the University of California (Santa Cruz), it is the latter that pollinate plants more efficiently than long-nosed ones. "The long-nosed bat is a subspecialist pollinator and has always been considered a staple. But research has shown that the pale bat actually picks up 13 times more pollen per visit," said Winifred Frick, a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The study highlights the complex nature of mutually beneficial relationships between plants and their pollinators, which in most cases develop together over a long period of time, but often there are conflicts of interest between partners. Kathleen Kay, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, says the long-nosed bat's adaptations allow for more nectar rather than more pollen on the body. Long-nosed do not sit on a flower, and in most cases hang nearby, collecting nectar with a long tongue. Pale bats, on the other hand, have to land on the flower and stick their heads deep inside to get to the nectar, resulting in more pollen accumulating on their heads. In addition, long-nosed bats consider pollen as a source of protein and regularly eat some of the pollen during the night.

According to www.sciencedaily.com, the scientists observed cactus flowers at 14 research centers in California, working with a team of students from Mexico and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The results showed that the pale bat not only picks up more pollen per visit, but in some areas does so frequently enough to be more effective pollinators than long-nosed bats.

"Many pollinators have evolved with plants over a long period of time," Kay says. "You might think that the new pollinator has no adaptations and is therefore not as good, but in this case it really is the best, as it is poorly adapted for collecting nectar. This study provides an idea of ​​​​the beginning of the romance of a flower and its pollinator." Frick has video footage of a bat attacking a pale moth on a large flower, so it's not hard to imagine insectivorous bats discovering sweet nectar hidden inside a cactus flower.

Kay noted that many animals only eat plants or otherwise use them without pollinating flowers. In the case of a pale smooth-nosed existence is mutually beneficial. In addition, long-nosed bats migrate, that is, the size of their population in different territories changes from year to year, which can contribute to the evolution of insectivores as plant pollinators.

Source All-Russian Ecological Portal

The ultimate goal of a typical flower is the formation of fruits and seeds. This requires two processes. The first one is . After it, the actual fertilization occurs - fruits and seeds appear. Let's consider further what exist.

General information

Pollination of plants - stage, on which the transfer of small grains from the stamens to the stigma is carried out. It is closely connected with another stage in the development of crops - the formation of the reproductive organ. Scientists have established two types of pollination: allogamy and autogamy. In this case, the first can be carried out in two ways: geitonogamy and xenogamy.

Characteristics

Autogamy - by transferring grains from stamens to the stigma of one reproductive organ. In other words, one system independently carries out the necessary process. Allogamy is the cross transfer of grains from the stamens of one organ to the stigma of another. Geitonogamy involves pollination between flowers of one, and xenogamy - different individuals. The first is genetically similar to autogamy. In this case, only the recombination of gametes in one individual takes place. As a rule, such pollination is characteristic of many-flowered inflorescences.

Xenogamy is considered the most favorable in terms of its genetic effect. Such pollination of flowering plants increases the possibilities of recombination of genetic data. This, in turn, provides an increase in intraspecific diversity, subsequent adaptive evolution. Meanwhile, autogamy is of no small importance for the stabilization of species characteristics.

Ways

Pollination method depends on grain transfer agents and flower structure. Allogamy and autogamy can be carried out with the help of the same factors. They, in particular, are the wind, animals, man, water. The most diverse are the methods for allogamy. The following groups are distinguished:

1. Biological - carried out with the help of living organisms. This group has several subgroups. Classification is carried out depending on the carrier. So, it is carried out (entomophilia), birds (ornithophilia), bats (chiropterophilia). There are other ways - with the help of mollusks, mammals, etc. However, they are rarely found in nature.
2. Abiotic - associated with the influence of non-biological factors. This group distinguishes between the transfer of grains with the help of wind (anemophilia), water (hydrophilia).

The ways in which it is carried out are considered adaptations to specific environmental conditions. In genetic terms, they are less important than types.

Plant adaptations for pollination

Consider the first group of methods. In nature, as a rule, entomophily occurs. The evolution of plants and pollen vectors took place in parallel. Entomophilous individuals are easily distinguished from others. Plants and vectors have mutual adaptations. In some cases, they are so narrow that the culture is not able to exist independently without its agent (or vice versa). Insects are attracted to:

1. Color.
2. Food.
3. Smell.

In addition, some insects use flowers as a shelter. For example, they hide there at night. The temperature in the flower is several degrees higher than that of the external environment. There are insects that reproduce themselves in crops. For example, chalcid wasps use flowers for this.

Ornithophilia

Pollination by birds occurs mainly in tropical regions. In rare cases, ornithophilia occurs in the subtropics. Signs of flowers that attract birds include:

1. Lack of smell. Birds have a rather weak sense of smell.
2. The corolla is mostly orange or red. In rare cases, a blue or purple color is noted. It is worth saying that birds easily distinguish these colors.
3. A large amount of weakly concentrated nectar.

Birds often do not sit on a flower, but pollinate, hovering next to it.

Chiropterophilia

Bats pollinate mainly tropical shrubs and trees. In rare cases, they are involved in the transfer of grains to grasses. Bats pollinate flowers at night. Signs of cultures that attract these animals include:

1. The presence of fluorescent white or yellow-green color. It can also be brownish, in rare cases purple.
2. The presence of a specific smell. It resembles the secrets and secretions of mice.
3. Flowers bloom at night or in the evening.
4. Large parts hang from the branches on long stalks (baobab) or develop directly on the trunks

Anemophilia

Pollination of approximately 20% of temperate plants is carried out with the help of wind. In open areas (steppes, deserts, polar territories), this figure is much higher. Anemophilous cultures have the following features:

Anemophilous cultures often form large aggregations. This greatly increases the chances of pollination. Examples are birch groves, oak forests, bamboo thickets.

hydrophilia

Such pollination is quite rare in nature. This is due to the fact that water is not the usual habitat for crops. Many are above the surface and are pollinated mainly by insects or with the help of the wind. Features of hydrophilic cultures include:

Autogamy

75% of plants have bisexual flowers. This ensures self-transfer of grains without external carriers. Autogamy is often accidental. This is especially the case under unfavorable conditions for vectors.

Autogamy is based on the principle "self-pollination is better than none at all." This type of grain transfer is known in many cultures. As a rule, they develop in unfavorable conditions, in areas where it is very cold (tundra, mountains) or very hot (desert) and there are no vectors.

In nature, meanwhile, there is also regular autogamy. It is constant and extremely important for cultures. For example, plants such as peas, peanuts, wheat, flax, cotton and others self-pollinate.

Subtypes

Autogamy can be:

Cleistogamy is found in different systematic groups of crops (in some cereals, for example).

The ingenuity of nature knows no bounds! One of the proofs of this is the story of nectar-eating bats and plants blooming their night flowers, whose fates are closely intertwined in the forests of Central America. The size of our thumb, the tiny Commissaris leaf bat ( Glossophaga commissarisi) spends most of his life fluttering among tropical vines Mucuna and collecting the nectar of their flowers. By generously sharing the "drink of the gods", in return, the plants receive an additional pollinator. Attracting animals during the day in bright sunlight, flowers flaunt multicolored outfits, but at night, when even the brightest colors fade, nocturnal plants like Mucuna to attract the attention of bats, they resort to the help of sound.

At night, when even the brightest colors fade, nocturnal plants resort to the help of sound to attract the attention of bats.

At the biological station La Selva(Spanish for “forest”) in the north of Costa Rica, a tropical vine in a short time wove a green roof of leaves and flowers over a forest glade. Reminiscent of chandeliers on the ceiling in a large dark hall, palm-sized pale yellow blooms sway slowly. At sunset, the flowers begin to prepare for the reception of guests. The light green sepal is the first to slowly move upward, covering the bud like a lid, and, having risen, turns into a beacon. A little lower, two small side petals straighten out, exposing a gap at the base of the bud, from which a barely noticeable alluring garlic aroma spreads around. Mucuna use scent as a signal to attract nearby pollinators. But after, when the mice fly close enough, the main lure is the sound. Bats successfully use high-frequency sound for orientation in space. By emitting sound waves, animals pick up the smallest changes in the signals reflected from objects with their very sensitive ears. The incoming information is instantly processed by the brain, and the bat can instantly change its flight path, chasing a succulent mosquito, or deftly snoop between flowering tropical trees. Most species of bats prey on insects, with each flap of their wings they emit signals that spread over long distances. In contrast, nectar-eating mice use weaker waves, but their signals are much more complex - scientists call this trick frequency modulation. Thanks to it, animals can receive "acoustic images" containing accurate information about the size, shape, location of objects in space, and the structure of their surface. For the ability to better distinguish details, you have to pay with the range of such echolocation - it is effective only within a radius of 4 meters. In the tropical thickets of Mucuna lianas, beacon sepals serve as a kind of mirror, reflecting the signals of bats and sending back clearly identifiable information about themselves. Having learned to deftly recognize such beacons with the help of their senses, bats freeze in a hot embrace with buds. Definitely they are made for each other. A bat, climbing on top of a flower, clings to the base of the petal with its paws, tightens its tail, pulls up its hind leg and sticks its head into the bud. A long tongue rushes inward, triggering the “bomb” mechanism hidden in the flower: sinking deeper and deeper into the nectar, it causes chain explosions of anther sacs that abundantly cover the animal’s fur with a golden layer of fresh pollen. Bach! Bach! Bach! Ten buds have exploded, nectar supplies have been destroyed, and the bats are on their way. But the fast metabolism of bats does not allow them to fly away for a long time. Each animal visits the flower a hundred times a night. Liana type Mucuna holtonii with their "bombs" and a generous portion of nectar, it is one of the few species that animals land on, and not just fly up. Other plants, not so rich in nectar, do not receive such an honor: nectar-eating bats hover over them, devastating them in a fraction (1/5) of a second, without landing. About 40 species of the subfamily Glossophaginae make up the "air force" elite of nectar-eating bats. They belong to the family of leaf-nosed bats that live in the tropics and subtropics of the Western Hemisphere. Their bizarre noses, which gave the name to the whole family, allow them to skillfully emit complex echolocation signals. Pollination in exchange for nectar is a deal between a plant and a bat, which biologists have dubbed the scientific term chiropterophilia (from the Latin name for bats - Chiroptera). For millennia, bat-pollinated plants have “figured out a very elegant way to solve the difficult problem of attracting as many pollinators as possible with as little energy as possible. Instead of increasing the amount (and improving the quality) of the nectar, they instead made it more efficient for their bat partners to collect it. Plants hang out night flowers in free spaces for passage, so it is quite easy for bats to find them and collect nectar. (It's also much safer - predators like snakes and opossums simply have nowhere to hide.) In addition, flowers mix sulfur compounds into their scents: such a lure works over long distances, and bats cannot resist. However, the aroma is not for everyone, and on the contrary, it repels a person, resembling an imaginary mixture of the most unpleasant odors that exist in the world: it has notes of the smell of sour cabbage, garlic, rotten rotting leaves, sour milk and skunk. Mucuna and some other plants have gone a step further by adapting the shape of their flowers to attract bat sonar. Until 1999, no one could have imagined that plants could change shape to make it easier for animals to collect nectar. At the research station La Selva German biologists Dagmar and Otto von Gelversen from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg were studying the acoustic signals of bats when Dagmar noticed that the beacon sepals of the buds Mucuna very much like sound beacons-reflectors. They attract attention in the world of sounds, like a guiding light of a beacon in the dark. The hypothesis was confirmed after a series of experiments. The Gelversens continued their study of the acoustic characteristics of flowers in Erlangen using a colony of laboratory bats. Under their guidance, student Ralph Simon trained animals to drink nectar from randomly placed feeders of various shapes. The easiest and fastest animals managed to find rounded feeders - in the form of a bowl. Subsequently, Simon found similar forms of "feeders" in nature, and one of the flowers, which he saw in a photograph in a popular science magazine, had a saucer-shaped beacon. (Because of the red, rounded nectar-containing parts of the flower, the editors of the magazine mistakenly thought it was a fruit.) Intrigued, Ralph Simon went to Cuba, straight to where the flower was photographed. As a reward for perseverance, he received confirmation of his hypothesis by seeing how bats drink nectar from a flower, and he generously covers them with his golden pollen.

The study confirmed a fact long known to bats - flowers "speak" their own languages.

Back at the lab, Simon built similar beacons and attached them to the feeders. Ordinary flat beacons did not help much to find the feeder - the search time was almost the same as for unmarked feeders. But saucer-shaped beacons cut this time in half! “A flat lobe only gives off a flash in the world of sounds when the signal bounces off its surface,” explains Simon. “But the saucer beacon, when a bat approaches, sends back several strong signals, covering a vast area. It is very similar to a real lighthouse: the reflected sound has a unique timbre.” Continuing his work in graduate school, Simon designed a mechanical bat head that could move around. Inside, he installed a small source of ultrasound and two receivers at the vertices of the triangle, exactly imitating the nose and ears of the animal. During the experiment, the source nose emitted complex sequences of sounds at different frequencies, similar to the echolocation signals of bats, and Simon directed them to the flowers, mounted on a rotating stand, and recorded the reflected sound waves recorded by the receiving ears. So he managed to collect the acoustic characteristics of flowers of 65 plant species pollinated by bats. Each of the flowers Simon studied had a unique, pronounced acoustic image, a kind of "fingerprint". This study confirmed a fact long known to bats - flowers "speak" their own languages. Back in the 1790s, the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani was ridiculed for suggesting that bats “see” in the dark with their ears. A century and a half later, in the late 1930s, scientists confirmed this fact by establishing exactly how and by what mechanism bats "see" in the dark. And after 75 years, scientists found out that night plants help them “see”, adjusting the shape of their flowers in the process of evolution so that they can be better heard by pollinators, and as a result, “sparkling” in the world of sounds as brightly as their sparkle in the sun. the most multicolor day counterparts.