About the episode
Nature is full of tricks, or perhaps better said: full of evolutionary adaptations that have favored the survival of species. A very rare South African plant from the daisy family has made just such an adaptation to win over its neighbours.
This plant produces leaves with patterns that resemble female flies. They are so convincing that male flies are only too happy to drop by and then dive right on top of them. In an attempt to mate, they move back and forth, but something is not right. After a few more fruitless attempts, they give up, but then the plant already has exactly what it wants: pollen.
We already knew that this plant achieves this clever image on the leaves, including bumps and hairs, but how the plant does this is not yet known. Now researchers have found three groups of genes that have been put together in a new way in the leaves to make the fake flies possible.
One group adds iron to the red-purple pigment of the leaves, which in that spot forms the blue-green basis for the fly picture. The other group takes care of hair growth. And a third group takes care of the random-looking positioning of the fly.
So the plant did not develop one smart fake fly gene, no, genes that the plant already had for other jobs were given a new joint task. And from an evolutionary point of view, the plant also developed this trick very quickly.
It gives the plant, which grows in harsh conditions, with little time to reproduce, an advantage over other plants.
Read more about the research here: This deceptive daisy remixed its genes to make fake lady flies.
