Lifestyle
Forget flowers: These ancient plants attract pollinators by getting hot
Beetles (Rhopalotria furfuracea) visit a male cone of the cycad plant Zamia furfuracea, whose cones produce heat during pollination.
Michael Calonje
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Michael Calonje
Some of the earliest plants attracted pollinators by producing heat that made these plants glow with infrared light, according to a new set of experiments.
The work, published in the journal Science, suggests that long before brightly colored flowers evolved, these ancient plants would metabolically rev themselves up when they had pollen at the ready. Nocturnal insects such as beetles could then see that heat from afar and home in on the target.
These heat-producing plants, called cycads, exist today in tropical forests around the world, although they’re one of the most endangered plant groups.
“Some people call them dinosaur plants because they were much more dominant when the dinosaurs were around,” says Wendy Valencia-Montoya, a cycad expert at Harvard University.
Fossils from over 200 million years ago, compared to cycads that exist today, show that “the plants look exactly the same,” she says. “So they haven’t changed much in hundreds of millions of years.”
They’re related to pines, and male and female plants each produce fleshy, pine-cone-like structures that contain the pollen and the seeds. “That’s something very unique among this group of ancient plants,” says Valencia-Montoya, who says these are the oldest known plants that have pollen.
A couple of centuries ago, botanists noticed that these plants produced heat in their reproductive structures. Compared to the ambient air temperature, they can be hotter by 15 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, or even more.
“We think of producing heat as something that mammals do, or birds do, but in fact, plants can do it too,” she says, although it’s not common in the plant world and takes a lot of energy.
In these plants, the heat was thought to be a byproduct of metabolic processes. Or, maybe the heat volatilized the scent of the plant, much like plugging an air freshener into an electrical outlet to generate heat that sends scent around a room. Research done in the last couple of decades has shown that male and female cones heat up at slightly different times, which could send pollinators moving from one cone to the other.
To try to understand more about what was going on, Valencia-Montoya and her colleagues painted some pollinating beetles with fluorescent markers to watch when the beetles went to the plant. And they found that the beetles were clearly going to the plant cones when they heated up.
This thermal image shows two male cycad cones releasing pollen. This plant’s cones heat up during pollen-release.
Wendy Valencia-Montoya
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Wendy Valencia-Montoya
To decouple the heat from other potential signals that these plants produce, like scent and humidity, her team used 3-D printing to make some simulated pollen cones. These fake plant structures were hollow inside, and got filled up with heated sand.
The fake cones glowed in the infrared much like real plants. “It was quite striking, when we saw it in the field,” says Valencia-Montoya, who says the fake plants were deployed outside at the Montgomery Botanical Center in Coral Gables, Florida.
Using these fake plants, the researchers figured out a couple of tricks to see if insects were attracted to the infrared glow, rather than the tactile sensation of heat itself. For example, in one experiment, they wrapped the cone with plastic wrap that is transparent to infrared light. Insects could see the infrared light but not get close enough to the cone to actually feel the heat.
What they found is that the infrared glow, by itself, was enough to attract hundreds of pollinating beetles.
And when they looked at those beetles, they found that they have specialized antennae that have evolved to detect slight differences in temperature — similar to the heat-sensing receptors used by snakes to detect prey.
What’s more, it turns out that the beetles’ antennae seem to be tuned to the exact temperature range deployed by their host plant, since different beetle species frequent different cycad species.
“Infrared radiation is perhaps the oldest discovered pollination signal,” says Nicholas Bellono of Harvard University, one of the authors of the new study.
Back when plants first evolved pollen, the insects that were around were nocturnal and had poor vision, says Valencia-Montoya. “So it makes a lot of sense that a signal like heat was guiding them.”
But as new groups emerged that were active in the day and had better vision, like butterflies and bees, “it makes more sense for plants to change their signaling strategy to also tap into the sensory systems of these more recent pollinators,” she says, adding that in evolution, there’s a constant dance back and forth between plants and their pollinators. Once color became a possible signal, flowering plants had an immense range of color combinations at their disposal, allowing them to rapidly diversify.
These researchers used “a powerhouse of techniques” to prove that the temperature of cycad’s heat-producing cones is intimately related to attracting pollinators, and that this association is ancient, says Roger Seymour, with the University of Adelaide in Australia, who wasn’t part of the research team: “This is an important contribution.”
Seymour thinks that heat could have more than one role, however, and the chance for a warm-up may be a bonus for beetles that require high body temperatures for activity. “Heat can be a direct energy reward to insect pollinators which may remain inside a thermogenic flower for much longer than insects visiting non-thermogenic species,” he says.
Irene Terry at Tthe University of Utah, an ecologist who specializes in cycads and their insect interactions but wasn’t part of this research team, says it’s only been relatively recently that people realized these ancient plants even had pollinators, rather than just spreading their pollen with the wind.
Particular odorants seem to be important pollinator attractants, she says, noting that these plants can smell like everything from bubblegum to bell peppers. Still, this study shows “in the most beautiful way” that infrared is also key.
“I was not surprised at all that infrared was involved,” says Terry, given that other insects like mosquitoes use infrared to find their way to a target. “There’s a range of things that insects can see that we don’t.”
Imagine, says Bellono, being a prehistoric beetle trying to navigate the darkened environment in the early evening, and seeing various plants start to glow red.
“The infrared is an entirely different world that we don’t experience,” he says. “I think that’s a cool thing to think about, going back in time, that this signal was around when the dinosaurs were there, long before us. And the beetles still use it to this day and are still experiencing that world.”
Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
Kate Green/Getty Images
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Bruce Campbell
I’m Battling Cancer
Published
Bruce Campbell has revealed he has cancer, but says it’s a type that’s treatable, though not curable.
“The Evil Dead” actor shared the news Monday in a message to fans, writing, “Hi folks, these days, when someone is having a health issue, it’s referred to as an ‘opportunity,’ so let’s go with that — I’m having one of those.” He continued, “It’s also called a type of cancer that’s ‘treatable’ not ‘curable.’ I apologize if that’s a shock — it was to me too.”
Campbell said he wouldn’t go into further detail about his diagnosis, but explained his work schedule will be changing. “Appearances and cons and work in general need to take back seat to treatment,” he wrote, adding he plans to focus on getting “as well as I possibly can over the summer.”
As a result, Campbell says he has to cancel several convention appearances this summer, noting, “Treatment needs and professional obligations don’t always go hand-in-hand.”
He says his plan is to tour this fall in support of his new film, “Ernie & Emma,” which he stars in and directs.
Ending on a determined note, Campbell told fans, “I am a tough old son-of-a-bitch … and I expect to be around a while.”
Neve Campbell in Scream 7.
Paramount Pictures
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Paramount Pictures
The OG Scream Queen Neve Campbell returns. Scream 7 re-centers the franchise back on Sidney Prescott. She has a new life, a family, and lots of baggage. You know the drill: Someone dressing up as the masked slasher Ghostface comes for her, her family and friends. There’s lots of stabbing and murder and so many red herrings it’s practically a smorgasbord.
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