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Animal and plant communication at the ESA Annual Meeting
Date:8/4/2009

Even if this chemical camouflage is energetically costly for the bugs to produce, the benefits outweigh the costs, says Whitehead.

"Here, the bugs have tapped into a resource in a competition-free space," she says. "It emphasizes that even the most classic examples of mutualism in nature are not infallible."

Pitcher plants' red colors don't attract prey

Pitcher plants have distinctive adaptations for living in nutrient-poor soils: These carnivorous plants produce a pitcher-shaped structure with a pool of water in it. When insects investigate, they slide into the pitcher and meet a watery demise. The plant then dissolves the insect and uses it for food. Biologists have long assumed that in addition to their nectar-producing glands that attract prey to a potential food source, the plants' bright colors mostly shades of red and green help to attract insects. Like bees that are attracted to flowers there's a general idea that insects like bright colors, especially reds and yellows. But thus far there is little evidence that these colorful patterns attract prey to pitcher plants.

Aaron Ellison of Harvard University and his coauthor Katherine Bennett, a fifth grade teacher working under a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Teachers grant, placed painted tubes mimicking pitcher plants' natural color spectrum of redness into the plants' habitat. They found that red coloration didn't affect the number of ants the pitchers' primary prey that were captured.

These results are not surprising, says Ellison. Seventy percent of pitcher plants' prey are ants, which see the color red as grey. Since grey probably only weakly contrasts with the green base color of the pitcher, it's probable that the ants can't differentiate between mostly red and mostly green plants.

Ellison thinks this work is a good example of why biological concepts need to be tested and not simply assumed.

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Contact: Christine Buckley
christine@esa.org
202-833-8773
Ecological Society of America
Source:Eurekalert

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