The first flower in the world or pollinated by insects

Science Popularization BaseScience and Technology Daily, Beijing, June 7 (Reporter Liu Xia) Flowering plants appeared on the earth about 145 million years ago. What helped pollinate these earliest flowering plants? Australian scientists published a research paper in the New Botanist magazine on the 5th, stating that the world's first flower may have been pollinated by insects, and that approximately 86% of flowering plants in history have relied on insect pollination

Science Popularization Base

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, June 7 (Reporter Liu Xia) Flowering plants appeared on the earth about 145 million years ago. What helped pollinate these earliest flowering plants? Australian scientists published a research paper in the New Botanist magazine on the 5th, stating that the world's first flower may have been pollinated by insects, and that approximately 86% of flowering plants in history have relied on insect pollination.

About 90% of modern plants - approximately 300000 to 400000 species are flowering plants. In order to reproduce, pollen is produced in the flowers of these plants, which needs to be transferred to another flower to fertilize the ovules and produce viable seeds. Insects are small in size and have strong mobility, making them efficient pollinators. In fact, recent research on insect fossils has shown that some insects even pollinated plants before the first flower appeared.

Nowadays, most flowering plants rely on insect pollination, while others rely on vertebrates, wind, and even water pollination.

Which pollination method first appeared? To answer this question, scientists at the University of Sydney used the "genealogy" of all flowering plants and sampled more than 1160 species, dating back 145 million years. The results indicate that the first flower is likely to be pollinated by insects, and insect pollination is the most common method in the evolutionary history of flowering plants, with a probability of occurrence of 86%.

The research team also learned about the evolution of other pollination forms, including the pollination forms of vertebrates such as birds and bats, small mammals and even lizards, and Anemophily. Research has shown that wind pollination often occurs in open habitats at high latitudes; Animal pollination is more common in enclosed rainforests near the equator.

The research team pointed out that although it is unknown which insects pollinated the first batch of flowering plants, it can be confirmed that they were not bees. The first batch of insects to pollinate flowers must be very small, most likely some small fly or beetle, or some extinct insects.

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