Botany

Every time I look more and more into botany and plants, I realize just how much I don't know. So I'm calling on you good people of Lemmy to give me some resources. Plus maybe we can add them to the sidebar or a pinned post for other people who are interested.

Flowers are “giving up on” pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them as insect numbers decline, researchers have said.

A study has found the flowers of field pansies growing near Paris are 10% smaller and produce 20% less nectar than flowers growing in the same fields 20 to 30 years ago. They are also less frequently visited by insects.

“Our study shows that pansies are evolving to give up on their pollinators,” said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “They are evolving towards self-pollination, where each plant reproduces with itself, which works in the short term but may well limit their capacity to adapt to future environmental changes.”

Produced by the MAdLand consortium and made publically accessible via Zenodo. The series was presented in exhibition form in several botanical gardens across Germany this summer. Only this German version exists, unfortunately.

Guide to ID UK buttercups: https://botsocscot.wordpress.com/2020/06/06/three-of-our-common-buttercups-telling-them-apart/