Pitcher Plants Use Sound Reflector to Attract Bats and Their Poop – Modern

The plant’s reflection helps it stand out in the dense forest and attract the bat.

According to Caroline Schöner of the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald in Germany, these plants are now standing out from their environments with these special structures for bats to easily locate them. The pitcher plant provides the bat with insects to eat, and the bat poos to provide the plant with organic nutrients.

The bats poop in and around this plan and thus, keeping it well fertilized with the droppings, as confirmed by Schöner, senior author Gerald Kerth, and their colleagues.

The researchers also recruited some real bats and let them loose in a tented area with a bundle of dense shrubbery surrounding a pitcher plant.

Bats spend the day roosting but carnivorous pitcher plants may seem the most unlikely host for the winged-mammal yet bats in Borneo’s forests have a penchant for such plants. Researchers in a ex- research had discovered that the bats and the pitcher crops have a mutually useful relationship: The crops present a cozy roost with few parasites and a really flawless microclimate, and the bats poop in the crops.

To test whether the plants were particularly reflective of echoes, the researchers used an artificial bat head and microphone to play echolocation calls at pitcher plants and measure the reflected echoes. Similarly, the Nepenthes Iowii, another pitcher plant in Borne, survives on shrew poop. He continues saying, the bats can manage to differentiate this plant partner from all the other ones that look the same shape wise. The discovery is a first to show that plants have a bat-attracting feature for a goal other than pollination.

The researchers recruited Ralph Simon from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to their team.

Subsequent behavioral experiments showed that the bats respond to those sounds echoed back to them from the plants.

Tech Times reports the mutually beneficial relationship is an example of how nature uses evolution to solve survival problems. The bats also chose pitcher plants more often as the best places to roost when the reflector had not been reduced.

“Carnivorous plants in general have already solved the problem of nutrient deficiency in a very unusual way by reversing the “normal system” of animals feeding on plants”, said Michael Schoner, one of the researchers, in a news release. This specific species is not so effective in the carnivorous part of it, but instead gets many of its much needed nutrients from the poopy material which the bats usually leave in the plant’s “mouth” or around its base. He believes, with this plant the system is taking a new turn of reduction in various insect-attracting traits.