New research has shown that certain Australian native flowers have shifted away from using insects as pollinators and evolved their flower colour to the red hues favoured by birds.
We demonstrate, for the first time, that Australian native flowers exclusively pollinated by birds have evolved colour spectral signatures that are best discriminated by those birds.
We collected spectral data from over 200 flowering plants and identified the pollinators as birds or insects. We found that flowers exclusively pollinated by birds had initially evolved to suit insect vision, but more recently the spectral signature of bird-pollinated flowers had shifted towards longer wavelengths. The research showed that rather than just having any type of red reflection, bird-pollinated flowers targeted the specific wavelengths that best match the long wavelength tetrachromatic (four colour) vision of many Australian native birds.
(Photo: Adrian Dyer)
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