When Hummingbirds Visit, This Flower Pops Open like a Jack-in-the-Box

Most plants are sneaky. You think they're staying put, until one morning when you wake up to find your houseplant bent toward the window, or a vine that's clambered up your fence. But other plants operate more quickly. They close up their leaves at a touch, or fling their pollen onto a bee. Researchers discovered a previously unknown bit of plant acrobatics in Costa Rica. There, a flower works like a jack-in-the-box to shove its stamens into a hummingbird's face. Dusty Gannon, a PhD student at Oregon State University, and his coauthors were in Costa Rica to study a group of plants called Heliconia. The researchers wanted to know what pollinators are most important to these showy, claw-shaped flowers. Some plants are visited by many different pollinators, Gannon explains, but only rely on one or a few of those species to actually get the job done. The researchers knew that ...