Happy Nice Mall

Birds do. So are bees. Especially bees.

But common rats pollinating plants? Inside A study published in June in the journal Ecologytwo researchers in Colombia, brown ratssame ones garbage feast and stealing pizza slices In cities around the world, it can be the primary pollinator in urban settings for the feijoa plant, which produces a fruit widely consumed in the country.

“I knew the stories at first, but I was very surprised because I didn’t pay much attention,” said Carlos Matallana-Puerto, a plant biologist at Campinas State University in Brazil, whose descriptions were translated by João Custódio Fernandes Cardoso. , co-author of the report. “Then I started to get excited when I started working because I started to realize that it makes sense.”

In Mr. Matallana-Puerto’s hometown of Duitama, Colombia, residents, including his father and brother, and even the old woman who lives down the street, have long reported that typically nocturnal rats walk and roost in trees in broad daylight.

But when he started studying pollination science in college, the stories took on new meaning: Could mice be pollinating trees?

It wasn’t a leap to wonder if rats could be pollinators. Approximately 343 mammal species are pollinators. Bats, which some call “rats with wings”, well known for pollination banana, avocado, mango, agave and durian. elephant rats, honey rat, lemurs and the other rodents It has also been found to help plants do their reproductive work.

To test his hypothesis, Mr. Matallana-Puerto did what any good naturalist would do: He observed and observed that rats were attracted to feijoa plants. they produce a sweet fruit. pleasures like a mix of pineapple and guava.

In the neighborhood where his grandmother once lived, Mr. Matallana-Puerto spied 22 feijoa trees with a camera and binoculars to see what rats and other visitors were doing and potentially pollinating rats, from the perspective of the bedroom terrace. plants.

Mr. Matallana-Puerto saw from his bedroom window that brown rats accounted for 88 percent of all animal visits to feijoa flowers. The birds only visited a handful of times during his 60-hour observation.

If mice pollinate feijoa plants, their behavior is somewhat unusual. Most pollination by rodents It occurs at night at ground level in plants that carry strong odors and offer nectar as a reward.

In Colombia, feijoa flowers are found in the shade of trees without nectar or fragrance; instead, the mice feed on leaves and forage during the day when the flowers are open and fertile. According to the scientists, this may be the first case of rat pollination in which flower petals are pulled.

“Desserts,” Dr. Cardoso said the leaves.

More importantly, the mice don’t seem to harm the reproductive parts of the flowers when they feast on the succulent white petals. Instead, the rodents brush against the numerous red stamens that carry the pollen, until they can then attach to their fur coats and be transferred to another feijoa tree.

“It’s very unusual for a plant to have leaves as a source, and it’s pretty surprising that mice understand that they are nutritious,” he said. Jeremy MidgleyHe is a retired biology professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who was not involved in the study.

However, Dr. Midgley had some reservations about the hypothesis.

While the research showed mice visiting the plants, there was no information on how many of the flowers bear fruit as a result, he said. “It would be really nice if they showed that the rats actually cheat.”

Mr. Matallana-Puerto and Dr. When Cardoso searched the scientific literature, they found previous reports of the feijoa plant being pollinated by birds. Highlighting how urban pollination systems may change with urbanization, the researchers hypothesize that mice may become more frequent guests due to reduced bird activity.

The tale of rats and feijoa meeting in the city, and potentially elsewhere, is an unlikely love story: Neither is unique to Colombia.

Rats came from Europe, possibly as a result of colonization hundreds of years ago; feijoa trees spread northward from their homeland of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

Dr. “And these two met in Colombia,” Cardoso said. “So, they don’t co-evolve. They do not share a natural history. But they meet, and their morphology, physiology, and behavior allow them to interact.”