The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

by Zoë Schlanger

In 2018, he and his team found that flowers will invest more in advertising to pollinators if they’re growing among their kin. This was a perfect intersection of sexual strategy and family ties. Pollinators tend to be attracted to large floral displays; this is called the “magnet effect.” A cluster of especially colorful large flowers is like a giant billboard to an insect on the nectar prowl. But it takes a plant a lot of energy to make the pigments and build the petal material this requires, energy they potentially can’t use for other things, such as making seeds later in its life cycle. There’s a reproductive trade-off; bigger, brighter flowers might attract more pollinators, but may also limit the number of offspring they can ultimately birth from those pollinated ovules.