Specific Families and Genera > Iris
Moraea 2022
PaulFlowers:
This is one of the last to flower and one of my favourites. It’s a fly pollinated Moraea. Scent is like ferraria or mild fritillaria. I think the flower is supposed to resemble carion. Although there are a rainbow of colours in wild populations, outside South Africa there seems to be only cream and yellow. This specimen came from a donation to SABG from the late Terry Smale.
Moraea lurida
ArnoldT:
Hi Paul
what is the name?
PaulFlowers:
Arnold it is Moraea lurida - I’ve a few more flowering over the next few days - so expect variations on a theme.
Maggi Young:
Thought this might be of interest :
Remarkable floral colour variation in the functionally specialized fly-pollinated iris, Moraea lurida
Monika Moir, Steven D Johnson, Bruce Anderson
Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, boac009, https://doi.org/10.1093/botlinnean/boac009
"Abstract
Sapromyophilous flowers are visited by flies seeking carrion or faeces, and flowers of this guild are typically large, purple or red-brown, often speckled and produce a pungent scent. Flowers of the South African iris Moraea lurida conform to this syndrome, but show considerable variation in colour and pattern. We were intrigued by the floral variation within a single population and investigated floral visitors and the effect of body size on pollen loads and whether different colour forms attracted different pollinator assemblages. We found a diverse array of insect visitors, but Diptera comprised the overwhelming majority, with Calliphoridae considered to be the most important for pollination on the basis of their visitation frequency and pollen loads. Effective pollination appeared to be dependent on large-bodied flies that, unlike smaller flies, fit the entire crawl space between the anthers and petals and thus acted like a key in a lock. Choice experiments revealed that the most important fly pollinators showed no colour preferences, and fly vision modelling showed that flies may not be able to discriminate among the different colour forms. This may lead to relaxed selection on colour. Floral scent was dominated by an unusual mix of aliphatic acids and alcohols, characteristic of mammalian skin products and gut microbiome, probably exploiting the perceptual bias of flies to compounds that typify the mammalian microbiome and fermenting carbohydrates."
https://academic.oup.com/botlinnean/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/botlinnean/boac009
/6550628?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
MarcR:
Thank you, Maggi
That was indeed interesting You are very good at posting germaine articles on almost every thread.
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