What are pollinators?
- Apr 14, 2017
- 1 min read
Let’s start by addressing a basic question - what ARE pollinators, anyway?
Pollinators are animals that pollinate plants. They do so by transferring pollen from plant to plant, which helps to fertilize the plant. Once a plant has been fertilized, it will then produce fruits, seeds, or other reproductive structures such as cones, which ultimately help the plant to reproduce.
Animals such as bees, butterflies, and birds make the best pollinators simply because when they feed off of the nectar of a flower, they attract and collect pollen that is then deposited on another flower when they move on to feed at a new flower on a new plant, and so on, and so forth.
Animal pollinators are most essential to the flowering plants, or angiosperms. Check out the video below for a closer look at how bees dislodge pollen from plants.
Just a quick side note that not all plants produce pollen, and not all plants need animal pollinators - mosses and ferns, for example, produce spores that are usually distributed by wind or water, and gymnosperms (meaning “cone seed”) produce pollen that is spread by the wind.
While flowers can certainly self-pollinate, this isn’t ideal because it doesn’t provide for an exchange of genes between individual plants. Therefore, pollinators increase genetic diversity in a population by spreading genes between different individuals.
In general, while there are some angiosperms that don’t need pollinators because they spread pollen in the wind, there are many flowering plants that require animal pollination in order to reproduce.
Smithsonian Channel,. (2016). Slo-Mo Footage of a Bumble Bee Dislodging Pollen. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/J7q9Kn1rhRc
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