By Gail Gallessich

Flowers evolve in a predictable fashion to match the mouthparts of pollinating birds and insects, rather than engaging in a gradual “arms race” between flower and pollinator, according to a recent study by researchers at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, builds on work done by Charles Darwin more than 140 years ago.

Columbine flowers, found all over the Northern Hemisphere but with exceptional diversity in western North America, hold their nectar at the bottom of a spur that ranges from fractions of an inch to several inches long, depending on species. Bees, birds or hawkmoths that drink the nectar get dusted with pollen.

Justen Whittall, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Davis, built a genetic family tree of the North American columbines as part of his Ph.D. research with Scott Hodges, UCSB professor of ecology, evolution, and marine biology. They found that columbine nectar spurs repeatedly evolved in a predictable sequence from short to medium or from medium to long without becoming shorter. This progression matched the increasingly long tongues of bees, hummingbirds, and hawkmoths, respectively.

Almost three-quarters of the variation in the flowers occurred rapidly when new species formed, most likely to take advantage of a new pollinator. The remaining variation could have occurred by a more gradual mechanism, such as Darwin proposed.

In 1862, Darwin predicted that a moth with an equally long tongue would pollinate a jungle orchid with a long, deep flower. Such an insect was discovered in 1903, but was not actually observed pollinating the orchid until 1997.

Both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, the other pioneer of evolutionary theory, proposed that flowers and pollinators engage in an evolutionary race. If the flower spur becomes slightly deeper, pollinators will tend to evolve to have longer tongues, and then the flowers become slightly deeper again, and so on in a series of small, reciprocal steps.

“However, the columbines have evolved incredibly recently,” Hodges said. “So, the tongues of their pollinators were probably already at an optimal length for other flowers when the columbines came on the scene. The plants apparently had to evolve rapidly to fit the tongues, but the tongues probably evolved very little.”

Hodges explained that long-tongued pollinators can always reach the nectar of flowers with short spurs but animals with short tongues can’t get food from flowers with long spurs. This means that any shifts in pollinators will generally be toward ones with longer tongues; consequently, spurs get longer and longer during evolution.