An Exciting New Discovery – Unless You’re a Bug

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You never know when a chance encounter will lead to something really big.  It all started when I heard a flower burp.

Seriously.  I was photographing bees in a small wetland when I heard a very soft, but undeniable, belching sound come from somewhere nearby.  I ignored it the first time, but when I heard it again a few minutes later, it stopped me in my tracks.  It was about five minutes before I heard it again, and a full 2 hours before I finally tracked the sound to its source, but boy am I glad I took the time to do it.  If I hadn’t we may never have found out that the blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) is a carnivorous plant – and that it burps during its meal.

A soldier beetle, lured to a lobelia flower by the sweet scent and promise of a pollen meal, is held fast by the flower and slowly digested from the head up. Most amazing is the yet unexplained "burp" sound that is emitted by the flower at fairly regular intervals during this process.

A soldier beetle, lured to a lobelia flower by the sweet scent and promise of a pollen meal, is held fast by the flower and slowly digested from the head up. Most amazing is the yet unexplained “burp” sound that is emitted by the flower at fairly regular intervals during this process.  Be sure to read to the very end of this post for all the information on this.

If you didn’t know me so well, you’d think I was just making things up, right?  Imagine how difficult it was for me to get any prominent botanists to believe me.  I spent painstaking hours armed with borrowed sound recording equipment trying to get a lobelia flower to eat a small cricket only to find out that – apparently – lobelia flowers are picky eaters.  In case you’re wondering, they also turn up their noses at hover flies, lady bugs, and stink bugs (ok, the last one makes sense, I guess).  It was only when I fed it a soldier beetle (the species I’d actually seen and heard that first lobelia flower feeding on) that I finally got the sound I needed.  And even then, the first 11 botanists I sent it to accused me of just burping into a microphone and sending it to them.

Finally, I found someone who took me seriously.  Dr. Geoffrey Pullen-Yyrlig at Chandler University in Stockholm returned my email and said he’d like to hear more.  After several back and forth exchanges, he agreed to help me document and publish the observation.  As a result, we have an article coming out this week in the next issue of the Journal of Acoustical Botany.  In it, we speculate that the lobelia flower uses its scent to lure soldier beetles in for a meal of pollen but then has a yet-to-be-understood method of preventing the beetle from backing out of the flower once it’s in.  We think it may be related to a chemical bond that occurs between the flower’s surface and the unique texture of the soldier beetle’s wing coverings.  We have absolutely no explanation for the burping sound.

Anyway, I’ll be sure to post the link to the article when it comes out, but I wanted to be sure to let you know about it today.  It seemed like the right day to finally post something about this discovery!

A burping plant.  Who would have guessed?  Nature is full of surprises, isn’t it?

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Oh, I almost forgot…

Happy April Fools Day!

Photo of the Week (And Two Milestones) – March 29, 2013

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Continuing with the theme of the week (at least for me) here’s yet another prescribed burn photo.  We ended up burning three days in a row this week, making the week both productive and exhausting!  However, just getting three consecutive days of appropriate weather for burning is worth of celebration!

Controlling the backing fire on one end of a prescribed burn, with the flames of the headfire in the background. The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Crew members control a backing fire on one end of a prescribed burn while the flames and smoke of the head fire fill the sky in the background. The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Today is also a good day to celebrate two milestones related to this blog.  First, this is the 300th post I’ve written, since starting this blog in the fall of 2010.  It’s hard to believe I’ve written that much in just a few short years!

As I’ve said before, writing this blog makes me a better ecologist. The process of synthesizing ideas into blog posts forces me to take the time to think much more carefully about subjects than I otherwise would.  My job always keeps me hopping, and it’s tempting to just jump to the next urgent task without paying sufficient attention to what’s happening in our prairies or finding out what others are learning.  This blog motivates me to pause and focus on the bigger picture.

It’s also gratifying to know that there are others interested in the same topics I am – and there are a LOT of you!  The second milestone I wanted to mention is that the number of people who follow this blog via either email or Twitter recently exceeded 1000!  More than a thousand people are sufficiently interested in prairies, photography, or both, that they’ve added this site to the bombardment of emails or tweets they sort through each week.  That’s fantastic – and it doesn’t include many more of you who check in regularly to see what’s new but aren’t subscribers. 

Thank you for following, reading, and commenting on this blog.  It’s invigorating for me to put posts together, and equally invigorating to read and respond to the insightful comments you give back. 

Now, I’d love to say more, but I’ve got to start thinking about what I’m going to write about for next week…  Plus I’ve got this list of urgent tasks staring at me from my desk!

Have a great weekend.