Desert cactus flowers hedge their bets with two pollinators
Garcia-Simpson B, Prado BA, Pellón JJ, Valiente-Banuet A
Pollinators
If you grow cacti or succulents, this shows why some plants keep their pollination options open: a hummingbird-and-bat backup plan means fruit still sets even if one visitor disappears for a season.
In a desert along the Peruvian coast that survives on fog instead of rain, a tall columnar cactus called Haageocereus acranthus grows flowers in two colors: white and pink-red. Scientists expected white flowers to attract bats and pink-red ones to attract hummingbirds, the way many flowers specialize for a single pollinator. Instead, both colors got visited by both hummingbirds and bats about equally, suggesting the cactus benefits from having more than one pollinator on call in an unpredictable environment.
Key Findings
Hummingbirds were the most frequent floral visitors, followed by bats, based on trail-camera monitoring across a year
Floral morphology, nectar production, and anthesis timing matched vertebrate pollination (leaning toward bat-pollination traits) but did not differ between white and pink-red flower morphs
Neither hummingbirds nor bats showed a preference for either flower color, indicating a mixed rather than color-specialized pollination system
chevron_right Technical Summary
A columnar cactus in Peru's foggy coastal desert produces both white and pink-red flowers, but researchers found both colors are visited equally by hummingbirds and bats, meaning the plant hedges its bets with more than one pollinator instead of specializing.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Mixed-vertebrate pollination traits and pollinators of Haageocereus acranthus (Cactaceae) in a lomas desert ecosystem of coastal Peru.
Cacti rely mostly on animals for pollen transfer and fruit set and constitute key elements of arid and semi-arid ecosystems of the New World. Although bee pollination is ancestral, systems supporte...
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A cactus is a member of the plant family Cactaceae, a family of the order Caryophyllales comprising about 127 genera with some 1,750 known species. The word cactus derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek word κάκτος (káktos), a name originally used by Theophrastus for a spiny plant whose i...