Hi Everyone! I'd like to post a short update on the work I'm doing this week with the radiant winecup (Geissorhiza radians) and its look-alikes, but first I'd like to remind you that there are only 3(!) days left of my crowdfunding campaign so if you've been considering donating, now's the time. And if you haven't already, please forward the link to anyone you think might be interested. I know many of you in North America have been donating to hurricane relief and that comes first, absolutely, but it's also important to fund scientific research, especially environmental research now, before it's too late and this weather becomes the new normal which could spell the end for Critically Endangered species already teetering on the brink like many I'm working with. https://experiment.com/projects/… Once again, I'm posting the text here, but please visit the lab note on my crowdfunding campaign for the photos that go along with the text - well worth the extra click! Link below https://experiment.com/u/xC5uLg/ Can you spot the difference between each of the flowers below? If not, you're not alone; it's likely their pollinators can't either. But what's going on here? Is one mimicking the other to co-opt it's pollinator? Does their pollinator just prefer this blue and red pattern which has caused the convergent evolution of these species to one optimal color pattern? Is the pollinator hardwired to prefer this pattern or is it a learned response? I certainly can't say... yet. What I can tell you is that these are each separate species, they overlap in distribution, flower at the same time, and, although from two separate genera, they all look almost exactly alike! I'm back in Darling with renown pollination biologist, Steve Johnson, trying to figure it all out. We're gathering preliminary data on these species' pollination systems so that we may design a rigorous set of experiments to untangle who might be mimicking who and to reveal the pollinator's taste in flower color and pattern. It's possible that some of the flowers are rewarding (offer nectar) and one is not so that the non-rewarding species is a Mullerian mimic of the others. This is a common syndrome in orchids but has never been observed in the iris family. Today we made novel pollinator observations that confirm at least three of these species share a pollinator, a tabanid horse fly, so we are already laying the groundwork for a fascinating study to come. I've taken tissue samples from each of these species so it will be interesting to make the phylogeny and see exactly how they're related - it's possible they're not even each other's closest relatives. There's already a dated phylogeny for Babiana so comparing the two should give us an idea who came first. Off the cuff, I'd say the Babiana because it's an older lineage, but after looking back at the phylogeny it appears that Babiana rubrocyanea is one of the most derived members, meaning it is one of the most recently evolved. So who knows?! As I've been thinking about this today, I can't help but be concerned for the future of this incredibly intricate and fragile web thousands, if not millions of years in the making. If each of these species depend on the others and each of these species is already severely threatened, how are they and the other symbioses of the Cape going to weather further human impact either directly through habitat loss or indirectly through alien species invasion and climate change? If one goes, do they all go? _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…