ArticleThe Journal of experimental biology2023
An ultrasound-absorbing inflorescence zone enhances echo-acoustic contrast of bat-pollinated cactus flowers.
Article in The Journal of experimental biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multimodal Plant-Animal Communication: Signaling Mechanisms, Coevolution, and Environmental Disruption.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Pollination ecology in the tropical Andes: moving towards a cross-scale approach.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- SonoNERFs: Neural Radiance Fields Applied to Biological Echolocation Systems Allow 3D Scene Reconstruction through Perceptual Prediction.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Flowering plants have evolved an extraordinary variety of signalling traits to attract their pollinators. Most flowers rely on visual and chemical signals, but some bat-pollinated plants have evolved passive acoustic floral signals. All known acoustic flower signals rely on the same principle of increased sonar reflectivity. Here, we describe a novel mechanism that relies on increased absorption of the area surrounding the flower. In a bat-pollinated cactus (Espostoa frutescens) we found a hairy inflorescence zone, a so-called cephalium. Flowers solely emerge out of this zone. We measured the echoes of cephalia, flowers and unspecialized column surfaces and recorded echolocation calls of approaching bats. We found that the cephalium acts as a strong ultrasound absorber, attenuating the sound by -14 dB. The absorption was highest around the echolocation call frequencies of approaching bats. Our results indicate that, instead of making flowers more reflective, plants can also evolve structures to attenuate the background echo, thereby enhancing the acoustic contrast with the target.
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