Today is a fabulous day. Why?
It’s World Bee Day 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
Bees may be taking centre stage today, but World Bee Day is about more than bees. It’s about celebrating (and taking better care of) all pollinators. That’s the animals that help many plants…um…make more plants by transferring pollen from one plant to another 🌺🌻🌸🌼🌷🪻🌹
Pollinators are everywhere - even in the sea!
In the sea, there is only one group of flowering plants - the seagrasses. If you were to take a peek at any seagrass meadow, you’d find loads of different animals living there. Some are big, like turtles, but many are tiny.
These tiny animals, like worms and crabs, move all over the seagrasses. Just like bees, their bodies end up covered in pollen from the flowers. When they move to another seagrass flower, they take that pollen with them, and voila!
But wait, there’s more! 😲
Tiny crustaceans called isopods have been spotted fertilising a red seaweed called slender wart weed in tidepools!
Hang on a minute, I just said that seagrasses are the only flowering plant in the sea. Seaweed isn’t seagrass. In fact, seaweed isn’t even really a plant 🤯
So what’s going on here?
Female slender wart weed keep their eggs inside little funnel-like structures called thalli. The males release their sperm into the ocean. What’s interesting about slender wart weed sperm is that they don’t have tails. They can’t swim to the female’s egg stash. Instead, the sperm sticks to the bodies of the isopods as they swim about. When the isopods make their way into the thalli, the sperm and the eggs finally get to do their thing!
The isopod, Idotea balthica, clinging to the red seaweed Gracilaria gracilis. Credit: Wilfried Thomas / Station biologique de Roscoff / SU / CNRS (CC-BY-NC-SA)
Want to read the science for yourself?
Here are the links (both open-access) 👇
🪱 Seagrass pollination: van Tussenbroek, B., et al. Experimental evidence of pollination in marine flowers by invertebrate fauna. Nat Commun 7, 12980 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12980
🦐 Seaweed pollination: • E. Lavaut et al. ,Pollinators of the sea: A discovery of animal-mediated fertilization in seaweed. Science 377, 528-530 (2022). DOI:10.1126/science.abo6661