But this advice does not come with the standard operating instructions!” “It turns out that to record activity at ground level, it is best to position your motion-trigger camera upside-down for recording in the field, and then use software afterwards to flip the footage back to right-side-up. Worse, you may obscure the motion sensor, which is critical to operate the camera! But you can’t be sure because both tricks make the viewfinder impossible to reach as it’s on the underside of the camera. “In theory that works to get the flowers in view. This involved a lot of re-positioning of rocks at 2700m! Another way was by partly sinking the cameras into the ground. One way was to either by angle them upwards on very steep ground. To get an angle where flowers were visible, we had to position cameras below the plants. The flowers lie on the ground, and the line of sight is almost inevitably obscured by the leaves under which the flowers are hidden. Ruth Cozien said: “The first challenge with filming “hidden flowers” is pointing a camera at any flower at all. That the lizards have been found now, is down to affordable motion-sensitive cameras.īut using them still isn’t a simple task. Firstly, because they really are unlikely to be visiting flowers, and secondly because they are unlikely to be observed if they do visit! Lizards (like mice and shrews) may even actively avoid humans, so these interactions are really difficult to document. Ruth Cozien explained: “Although it has been known for more than fifty years that some lizards do feed on flowers, they are still rarely considered as potential pollinators. Lizards are not on the list of suspects, when botanists search for pollinators. Ruth Cozien said: “We had strong, preconceived ideas about what we were going to find, to the extent that, based on the expectation that most pollinator activity would be between dusk and dawn (when rodents and shrews are most active), we even initially set most of the motion-trigger cameras to record only during the night, to save battery power and storage space on memory cards which are often major limitations on data collection when working with motion trigger cameras in inaccessible sites. We never put two and two together because it simply never occurred to us that a plant in continental Africa would be pollinated by lizards.”įlowers like the “Hidden Flower” look like other flowers that use rodents and shrews as pollinators. They both have a preference for rocky, high elevation habitats. We were aware lizards occasionally visit flowers on islands, and we knew that lizards are very abundant where Guthriea occurs. “‘Gobsmacked'” is probably the most appropriate word to describe us when we saw the first footage,” said Ruth Cozien, first author of the paper. A Drakensberg Crag Lizard ( Pseudocordylis subviridis) licking nectar from the “Hidden Flowers” of Guthriea capensis in a terrarium (photo Ruth Cozien & Steve Johnson) Drakensberg Crag Lizards pick up pollen on their snouts when they visit the flowers to lap nectar. After many fruitless hours of human observations, cameras triggered by motion-detectors finally revealed the identity of a shy and highly surprising pollinator. The team found staked out a group of “Hidden Flowers” in the Maloti-Drakensberg World Heritage Site in South Africa. They have published their discovery in the journal Ecology. Researchers from South Africa and the Netherlands, based at the Pollination Ecology Research Lab at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Afromontane Research Unit at the University of the Free State, think they have the answer. The flowers are, however, filled with nectar and strongly scented, which suggests that some animal does manage to find and pollinate the “Hidden Flowers”- but what is it? Just as their common name implies, the flowers are hidden at ground level, beneath the leaves of the plant. The flowers of Guthriea capensis are different. How do you attract pollinators, like bees and butterflies, if you have flowers? Almost 90% of flowering plants use bright colourful floral displays to attract their pollinators.
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