I hope I can finish posting this before the battery runs out on my laptop. It’s been one long power cut after another for the past couple of days and the one we’re experiencing at the moment started more than three hours back. Anyway, I thought this piece in EurekAlert really interesting and I couldn’t wait to blog about it. There’s this rare endemic plant on Mauritius called Trochetia blackburniana, you see, and it happens to be pollinated by the equally endemic gecko Phelsuma cepediana. But this is a day gecko, which means that to avoid predators they have to spend a lot of time hiding, and their favourite place for doing that is among the spiky leaves of Pandanus shrubs. Now, I’m not sure about Mauritius, but in lots of other places around the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Pandanus is a really useful plant: the fruits are eaten, the leaves woven into mats, people recognize and maintain dozens of varieties etc etc. So here’s something else that Pandanus is important for: protecting the pollinators of a rare Mauritian endemic.
P.S. Incidentally, Trochetia blackburniana, which is in the Malvaceae, seems to be one of the very few species of plants with coloured nectar.
Correction: Trochetia is actually in the Sterculiaceae. Apologies. Please read the comments for more interesting stuff on this genus.
Thanks for this Luigi. But a precision about the Trochetia which is an endemic genus to the Mascarenes with 5 species in Mauritius and 1 in Reunion island. The Trochetia belongs to the Sterculiaceae family. All of the species except T. blackburniana are threatened species. One species (T. parviflora) is said to be extinct in the flora of the Mascarene, but botanists in Mauritius have rediscovered the species. Effectively the nectar of this plants is blood red. An annedote on this: while I was working on this plant, one of the hundreds of the threatened plants of Mauritius, I propagated some in our Forest nursery and came to flower. One morning I came in and found blood on the floor and I thought one of our nurseryman cut himself and I was alarmed. But no one was hurt. later I found out it came from the flower of this Trochetia (t. uniflora). Nectar was always dripping down from it. It is also know that an endemic birds called picpic (Zosterops spp.) also pierce the base of the flowers to drink its nectar.
Thanks, Ehsan, that’s a great story. And thanks for the correction about the family. Has Trochetia been moved between families of late? Because I see that in some places the family is given as Malvaceae, and in some as Sterculiaceae.
Well. I am not sure when it has been moved, but the flore des Mascareigne published the fascicule on Sterculiaceae sometimes in the 1980’s I think.
Is anyone producing red honey? Could be a nice niche market.
Do geckos produce honey? Seriously, I wonder if bees go anywhere near those flowers?
Ahum, well, I have never heard of gecko honey either, and if bees did frequent these flowers, the geckos probably would not be the pollinators.
Hi there;
Nice to see our work is noticed! I hope you all enjoy the story as much as we did figuring it all out! That’s why I love science — questions abound, and answers are often found in the most unlikely of places.
Correction to the correction (sorry!) – Trochetia is indeed in the family of Malvaceae now; in the age of molecular systematics, many families are put together into larger units, as their relatedness is unravelled. Sterculiaceae is now “only” a subfamily. Which also makes me a bit sad, because I always think of the chocolate tree as the ultimate Sterculiaceae -and now it’s just another Malvaceae. Oh well!
Cheers,
Dennis
The prop roots of the Pandanus impressed me deeply. Pandanus is reserved as a kind of medicine plant in medicine garden of Xishuangbanna Yunnan Province China.