Botany

Flowers are “giving up on” pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them as insect numbers decline, researchers have said.

A study has found the flowers of field pansies growing near Paris are 10% smaller and produce 20% less nectar than flowers growing in the same fields 20 to 30 years ago. They are also less frequently visited by insects.

“Our study shows that pansies are evolving to give up on their pollinators,” said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “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.”

Produced by the MAdLand consortium and made publically accessible via Zenodo. The series was presented in exhibition form in several botanical gardens across Germany this summer. Only this German version exists, unfortunately.

Guide to ID UK buttercups: https://botsocscot.wordpress.com/2020/06/06/three-of-our-common-buttercups-telling-them-apart/

A wonderful guide for long car rides.

Apologies for the silly clickbait headline.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/986772

Let's see how many interesting facts about beans we can bring together.

Pythagoras’s aversion to beans, though, always got a lot of attention, even from ancient writers. According to Pliny, Pythagoreans believed that fava beans could contain the souls of the dead, since they were flesh-like. Due to their black-spotted flowers and hollow stems, some believers thought the plants connected earth and Hades, providing ladders for human souls. The beans’ association with reincarnation and the soul made eating fava beans close to cannibalism. Aristotle, writing earlier, went much further. One possible reason for the ban, he wrote, was that the bulbous shape of beans represented the entire universe. Nevertheless, other Greeks ate plenty of fava beans, and Pythagorean beliefs were mocked. The poet Horace tauntingly called beans “relations of Pythagoras.”