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感绝上是这本书
The sex life of flowers
Bastiaan Meeuse, Sean Morris
Facts on File, 1 Sep 1984 - Nature - 152 pages
Page 52
It concerned the curious little arum lily Arisarum proboscideum, known as the mousetail plant. ... from the forest floor and entering the floral chamber through the window, is immediately confronted by the appendix of the ... The organ is also off-white in colour so that the overall visual impression it gives is deceptively like that of the ... the cap of a Boletus mushroom. ... claimed that the plants' pollinators were female fungus- gnats — animals that normally breed in decaying mushrooms !
Pollination by mushroom-gnats
P1：十九世纪一个意大利植物学家研究一种植物Arisarum Proboscideum(后文简称AP)。
这种百合花(Lily)很臭，花是深色系的。它的结构很奇怪，有个appendix 呈现弯的尾巴状并且拖地，花是封闭的，上面有个cap，朝地面方向有个window。(Q3)
这种植物会伪装成菌类(fungi)来引诱昆虫(insects)替它们传粉。
这个理论(hypothesis)在当时(at that time)被认为是不可信的(unbelievable)。(Q8)
但被后来的研究(subsequent research)证实了。
In the late years of the nineteenth century, the highly-esteemed Italian botanist Areangeli described a pollination case so “unbelievable” that even his friends began to tear that he had fallen prey to early senility. It concerned the curious little lily Arisarum proboscideum, known as the mousetail plant. Its inflorescence has a cylindrical, vertical, but slightly bent-over floral chamber that is completely closed except for an elliptical window that looks slightly earthwards. On top of the floral chamber, and forming an extension of it, there is a dark-coloured, extremely slender, drawn-out and curved tip, the ‘mousetail’. (In spring, the plants bear inflorescences and leaves at the same time, and when one has a whole dense bed of them in the garden, they do indeed give the impression that a small army of mice – all sticking up their tails at the same time – has found refuge among the folioage.)
A small flying insect, coming up from the forest floor and entering the floral chamber through the window, is immediately confronted by the appendix of the inflorescence, which in this case is not hard and smooth as it is in many other arum lilies but is spongy and full of little depressions. The organ is also off-white in colour so that the overall visual impression it gives is deceptively like that of the underside of the cap of a boletus mushroom. Areangeli claimed that the plants pollinators were female fungus-gnats – animals that normally breed in decaying mushrooms. The mousetail plant fools them so successfully that the females deposit their eggs in, or on, the appendix. Getting down more deeply into the floral chamber they will also pollinate the plant. It is gratifying that further research in the 1960s and 1970s exonerated Arcangeli completely. This ‘unbelievable’ story was true.
Fungus mimicry is a fairly widespread pollination strategy and in most cases the pollinating gnats lay eggs that are bound to perish. Most of these fungus mimics are forest-dwellers: the plants remain close to the ground and produce flowers that are dark purple or brown in colour, with pale or translucent patterns. To the human nose at least they are either scentless. The inflorescence of the Mediterranean mousetail plant (Arisarum proboscideum) is known to attract female, which are
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发表于 2018-10-6 19:19:12
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