Many flowering plants woo insect pollinators and gently direct them to their most fertile blossoms by changing the color of individual flowers from day to day. Through color cues, the plant signals to the insect that it would be better off visiting one flower on its bush than another. The particular hue tells the pollinator that the flower is full of far more pollen than are neighboring blooms. That nectar-rich flower also happens to be fertile and ready to disperse its pollen or to receive pollen the insect has picked up from another flower. Plants do not have to spend precious resources maintaining reservoirs of nectar in all their flowers. Thus, the color-coded communication system benefits both plants and insects.

   For example, on the lantana plant, a flower starts out on the first day as yellow, when it is rich with pollen and nectar. Influenced by an as-yet-unidentified environmental signal, the flower changes color by triggering the production of the pigment anthromyacin. It turns orange on the second day and red on the third. By the third day, it has no pollen to offer insects and is no longer fertile. On any given lantana bush, only 10 to 15 per cent of the blossoms are likely to be yellow and fertile. But in tests measuring the responsiveness of butterflies, it was discovered that the insects visited the yellow flowers at least 100 times more than would be expected from haphazard visitation. Experiments with paper flowers and painted flowers demonstrated that the butterflies were responding to color cues rather than, say, the scent of the nectar.

   In other types of plants, blossoms change from white to red, others from yellow to red, and so on. These color changes have been observed in some 74 families of plants.

Which of the following describes the sequence of color changes that lantana blossom undergo?

Câu hỏi liên quan

• The expression catch a whiff is closest in meaning to________.

• What kind of film is each program?

• The word “these" is the first passage refers to_________.

ZUNIA12

• Why does the author mention the police officer's uniform?

• Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

• Which of the following can result from the loss of one species in a food chain?

• Which of the following sentences is true?

• According to paragraph 1, which of the following is NOT true?

• The phrase “of no consequence” means ________.

• Why do most visitors come to Cambridge?

• It can be inferred from paragraph 1 that Mantle ______.

• What surprised John most about the flight?

• The word “bounds” in line 5 is closest in meaning to ........

• The author’s main purpose is to...

• Education in early times was mostly aimed at .....

• What is true of Lake Vostok?

• The word “contagious” is closest in meaning to ___________.

• Which of the followings is true about the job of the freelance writers?

• In paragraph 2, non-native species are mentioned as ______.

• The word “pseudonym” in the passage refers to ___________.