Prof. Jun Yokoyama, Biology expert from Yamagata University, Japan, has given a public lecture on the interaction between plants and agent of pollination (pollinator) at Faculty of Biology UGM.
Yokoyama described his paper entitled Diversity and Evolution of Plant-Pollinator Interactions to dozens of students and lecturers of Faculty of Biology UGM. He explained that primitive plants do pollination by way of wind. Unfortunately, this makes just a little pollen reaches the stigma and experiences pollination.
“Much of the pollen is wasted, only 0.01 percent of the total pollen reaches the stigma and experiences pollination,” he said on Friday (23/3).
Evolutionarily, said Yokoyama, the plant later uses animals as pollinator. To get the attention of pollinator, there is symbiosis mutualism mechanism between the plant and the pollinator. In this case the plant is the medium of sexual reproduction while the animal gets the food and nectar.
“Pollinators that have the role in pollination include bees, moth, dung beetle, fly, bird, bat, lemur, and cockroach,” he said.
According to Yokoyama, pollinators have different characteristics of pollination, for example, fly as flower pollinator also has the smell like carcass or faeces, so is the plant. Some flowers also experience pollinator specialisation. Among them is Ophrys orchard that has petals which look alike female bee, hence attracting the male bees to do pollination.
“In several cases, there is a flower experiencing excess specialisation so that the specific pollinator go extinct or limited. In the end, the flower experiences an evolution to be able to do self-pollination and retains its sustainability,” he said.