Africa

  Flowers are all about marketing. From colors, scent, and physical structure (like the exact weight a petal will hold), plants are meticulously designed to attract just the right pollinator for the job. In most cases, that pollinator will be a bird, a bee, an insect, or sometimes even a mammal. But in a first for continental Africa, a “Hidden Flower” plant, located high up in the Maloti-Drakensberg World Heritage Site in South Africa, was recently discovered being pollinated by a reptile: the shy Drakensberg Crag Lizard. Although flower visitation by lizards is not unknown, it had been thought to occur almost exclusively on oceanic islands. Project leader Ruth Cozien, from the Pollination Ecology Research Laboratory and Centre for Functional Biodiversity at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, says one should keep in mind that mountains are like “sky islands” and might therefore have similarities with oceanic islands in terms of their ecology. Hidden Flower, true to its name, is a plant species with green flowers hidden at ground level, underneath the leaves of the plant. The flowers are also strongly scented, and nectar-filled, but academics wondered who the pollinator was— a bee, a bird, perhaps a mouse, or non-flying mammal? Initially, the group of researchers thought it was being pollinated by a non-flying mammal. “Everything about the plant made it look like it should be mammal-pollinated,” said Dr. Sandy-Lynn Steenhuisen, senior lecturer in the Department of Plant Sciences and affiliate of the Afromontane Research Unit (ARU) at the Qwaqwa Campus of ...