Figs and wasps

Figs and deceiving wasps

The symbiosis of plants, animals and insects has been known for a long time. However, sometimes this symbiosis is broken. This is how unscrupulous wasps do when they pollinate a fig tree. And as a result, a person would be deprived of tasty and healthy figs if the plants themselves did not find an effective way to solve the problem.

More than 700 species of fig trees fruitfully "cooperate" with wasps - almost every type of plant corresponds to a separate species of pollinator insect. Fig trees and wasps have long developed a kind of code for helping each other - for the ability to lay their eggs in fruits so that larvae develop in them, insects pollinate figs. And what happens when wasps cheat, scientists from Cornell University and the Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Research have revealed.

In the course of experiments, biologists evaluated the ability of six different pairs of "wasp-fig" to regulate the situation of deception - when the wasp does not fulfill its part of the contract, laying the larva, but not pollinating the plant. Observations showed: after detecting fraud, the fig punishes the insect by dropping an unpolished female flower with an undeveloped ovary and a larva inside to the ground, where it dies. According to experts, such "sanctions" testify to a long evolution of symbiotic relations between the two species, which went on for almost 80 million years. The subtle mechanism of maintaining "honesty" allows you to maintain the union, as it excludes the possibility of selfish use of one partner by another.

Based on materials from the online magazine MEMBRANA (www.membrana.ru)