6of nature's best pranksters
Animals have strange adaptations that they use to accomplish their daily functions, whether it is finding enough food, courtship, or caring for the young, but there are some species that have formed “shortcuts” through which they have been able to make some things a little easier for themselves.
In the following, we will review with you five animals and one plant, all of which benefit from other organisms in their environment by participating in mating rituals or relationships between hybrid species for their own benefit, and I can describe these beings as “cheats.”
1. Gray Floral Piercing:
Slaty Flowerpiercer
Plants can't create legs to help them move around in search of a partner, they're quite fixed in place, so their ability to reproduce, as a result, often depends on enticing pollinators, organisms that take pollen from one flower on one plant and put it in another flower on a plant another (ie, in short, they take those grains from the anthers of one flower to the stigmas of another flower on another plant).
Flowers have many tricks to attract these pollinators, such as bright colors, fragrant scents and a sugary liquid called nectar.
Insects, hummingbirds, and even bats dip their faces in flowers to sniff out some very sweet nectar, but as a result, pollen gets stuck all over their bodies. But some animals, known as “nectar thieves,” have developed insidious strategies that enable them to get what they want without being caught. Plants help.
One of those thieves is (the gray flower-piercer), a small bird that lives in Central America, and its trick lies in perching on the stem of the plant, then using its hooked beak to make a hole in the base of the flower, and using its tongue to extract the nectar without touching the flower apertures at all.
This method steals all flowers, giving these birds an added benefit: resilience!
Ordinarily, pollinators have to specialize in a specific nectar, as their beaks or proboscis are suited to specific shapes and sizes of flowers. Even so, the flower borer can gnaw through any flower it wants in order to get its sweet tooth. So flowers face a complex evolutionary dilemma: they need to defend themselves. It defends itself against nectar thieves by diluting its nectar to make it less attractive to them on the one hand, but the nectar must be sweet enough not to diminish the interest of pollinators, such as hummingbirds, on the other hand.
At least, the flower-piercing method of penetration and entry is considered effective, so far, in the tropical forests of (Costa Rica) and (Panama), the prize that this bird obtains as a result is very sweet nectar.
2. The cleaned wrasse:
Cleaner wrasse
For this fish, the reward for its deception is the nutritious mucus it steals from the bodies of other fish.
This small striped fish lives in coral reefs, and gets its daily sustenance by doing other reef fish a favor.
Another type of fish comes to places called "cleaning stations," and allows the cleaner wrasses to pluck and eat the scale parasites attached to their scales, so the wrasses get an easy meal on the one hand, and the other fish get rid of the pesky parasites on the other.
But where does the trick and cunning of our cleaner fish lie? In fact, while removing parasites from other fish, they also deliberately take small bites of the protective mucous coat that covers the fins of their fish "clients". parasites.
But in normal marine life, fish wouldn't visit the cleaning stations for wrasses that cheat so frequently, so they have to control themselves to keep easy meals coming back.
On the other hand, these fish tend to work in pairs, and if one of the partners cheats, he will be punished by his other partner, who will not accept losing “customers” because of his partner’s bad behavior. , the other partner will stalk their partner violently as a reprimand similar to: “Hey, stop that right now.”
3. Brown-headed cow blackbird:
Brown-Headed Cowbird
Passing on your genes to another generation is a lot of work, as you will then have to feed your offspring, shelter them, and protect them from predators, but some prankster birds have found a way around the hard work of incubation, so why bother spending weeks raising their chicks when they can lay their eggs In another bird's nest doing the job for her?
This behavior is called "incubation parasitism", and the most famous bird for it is (brown-headed cowbirds). While the female will not need to waste any time or energy in raising her young, she can thus produce a lot of eggs in one summer, where she lays The female is each egg in a nest of other songbirds, at a time when it is possible for the host bird to accept it.
The cowbird chick usually hatches before the rest of the chicks, and it acts like a small killer sometimes as it rolls the eggs out of the nest, eliminating competition for food and care from the adoptive parents, and if it does not do so, then there is no problem, as the chicks tend to grow faster than the rest of the host bird chicks, which makes them She bullies these little chicks, keeping them away from sharing food.
Unfortunately, chicks of songbirds that are unlucky enough to have a strange sibling being cared for by their parents rarely live long enough to be able to escape from the nest.
The former situation created an evolutionary arms race: if the host bird discovered a brooding parasite's egg in its nest, it would banish the intruder before it even hatched, so many parasitoids have evolved mechanisms to produce eggs that look exactly like the eggs laid by the host bird. In turn, the host birds' skills became better at recognizing the invasive eggs.
But the brown-headed cowbird has an unfair advantage in this race, and humans have something to do with it! Where these blackbirds prefer habitats with cut branches and forest edges, which appear due to our clearing of forests in order to expand additional place for urbanization.
As for the songbirds that are currently losing their homes, even if they find an acceptable spot to build their nest, they will find themselves raising a monster in the end!
4. Satellite Frog:
Satellite Frog
Many male frogs and toads use a sound to attract a female. Every spring, these males gather in ponds and swamps at night, issuing mating calls.
Females listen to their choice of calls and then go towards the males with the longest or loudest calls, so the males that succeed in this are healthy and well fed, and can give their young the best possible characteristics.
But the males of some types of frogs cheat and use a strategy that enables them to find a partner without issuing a single chirp!
These satellite males wait quietly near males that make the best quality calls, and when a female approaches in order to check for a real frog, the disguised satellite frog swoops down and calls the female sexually instead of the calling frog desired by that female.
In fact, some male frogs switch back and forth between being calling and satellite frogs, depending on who else is in the pond.
Experiments with European tree frogs, for example, found that males often resorted to satellite strategies when they were small, which made it difficult for them to make truly inviting sounds.
Also, on the other hand, the frogs listened to the calls from the neighborhood, and when those calls were not competing with them, those frogs started chirping again as well.
5. The Flirty Firefly:
Femme Fatale Firefly
Fireflies use specific patterns of blinking to find a mate, and each species has its own blinking code that helps them prevent crossbreeding, but one of them chose to participate for nefarious purposes.
The females of Photuris fireflies mimic the flashes of another type of firefly, the Photinus fireflies. When these cheating fireflies attract the males of the other species, they kill and eat them! But there's more to it than just having an easy meal.
In fact, the victims have chemicals called Lucibufagins in their blood, which we will call LBGs for short, which are steroids somewhat similar to the toxins found in some types of toads, and herein lies the benefit!
When these fireflies are threatened by predators such as spiders and birds, they secrete drops of blood full of LBGs.
Playful killer fireflies cannot produce these defensive chemicals on their own, so they must ingest their relatives who have these substances to be protected.
A group of researchers from Cornell University came to this conclusion using an ingenious series of experiments. They began by capturing the two types of fireflies mentioned, and then measured the levels of LBGs in the playful killer fireflies (species Photuris) before and after feeding them to males of the species (Photinus).
The researchers also tried feeding different fireflies to the jumping spider, ensuring that the spiders would not eat insects with high levels of LBGs in their blood.
So, black widows aren't the only dangerous females here, as the Photuris fireflies put them in a tough competition to win.
6. The Empty Orchid:
Empty orchids
Nature isn't just full of cheating animals, some plants do too.
We have talked about the ability of the gray flower-piercing bird to pierce any flowers it wants to attract nectar, but there is an orchid plant in South Africa that has turned that scenario around! It tricks insects into transporting pollen, but gives them nothing in return.
As we mentioned earlier, some insects have specialized in pollinating specific plants, and this is called “associative evolution.” Over time, plants become very effective in attracting and providing yield for a specific type of insect, and the insect, in turn, becomes very effective in pollinating that type. of plants.
Such is the case of Z. Microsiphon of South Africa, which produces long tubular flowers; These flowers are pollinated by a single type of fly that has a very long proboscis that can reach deep into the petal tube to sip the nectar.
Both species benefit from this process, as the fly gets its meal, and the plant in return gets the pollination needed to reproduce.
But another type of plant benefits from this sharing process, as there is a rare type of orchid that grows alongside Z. Microsiphon in some areas.
The flowers of this plant look suspiciously similar to those of Z. Microsiphon, long tubular, white and pink, and this plant mimics the slightest variations of Z. Microsiphon flowers in order to resemble those of its exact neighbour, but the flowers of this orchid are dry, not There is never any nectar in it.
So, it's all just cheating! This orchid attracts pollinating insects without making any efforts to produce nectar.
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