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Comment by hatsuseno | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what kind of discussion could be had about the subject, but I just want to add: this is so cool.

To start a discussion:

“This means that they don’t even need to touch flowers in order to pollinate them,"

So, the butterflies build up the charge as the fly around. Then they get near a flower and the pollen flies up and sticks to the butterfly. How does this pollinate other flowers? The pollen is stuck to the butterfly and not the flowers. Also, it seams it would mostly stick to the wings.

Just curios. It is a pretty amazing world around us.

From the paper[0] itself:

„This pollen can then be deposited on subsequently visited flowers, either by direct contact, or similarly through electrostatic attraction, because the pollen can equalize to the potential of the pollinator, and will then experience an attractive force towards the electric field of the flower. Experimental evidence demonstrates this bidirectional electrostatic pollen transfer.“

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2024.015...

Ahh, another case of "people on hacker news should read the article", I see! :)

(i am guilty of this too lol)

The article did not have that line and I was curious. I claim innocence:)

Now, though, I am interested in the electrostatic properties of the flowers.

It's ok, I'm electrically charged so I don't have to actually contact the article

I always hesitate to ascribe motives to non-human animals, but the butterfly shouldn’t particularly “care” whether the pollen gets from its body back to a plant. If the butterfly is eating the pollen, then maybe there’s an advantage to hoovering up more just by getting close, but that doesn’t mean it wants to give any pollen back to other plants.

On the other hand, if the butterfly is eating the nectar and the pollination is an ancillary effect, then you have to start invoking more complicated mechanisms. Maybe successful pollination of the plants increases the food supply later? Maybe the flowers are not neutrally charged, but instead become oppositely charged when the pollen is ready to bias pollinators to come close at appropriate times? You can always construct some just-so story that fits the observed evidence, but where it becomes science is when you make predictions and test them.

The butterflies are adults that do not need to grow, they just need energy, so they normally eat only nectar. They have a mouth adapted for sucking liquids, which could not be used to eat solid food, like pollen.

On the other hand, the bees collect both nectar and pollen. Nectar to provide energy for themselves (which they dehydrate into honey, which can be stored for a long time, unlike fresh nectar), and pollen, which is rich in proteins, to feed their larvae, which need to grow into adults.

I’m reading “The Light Eaters” which takes a broad look at plant behavior. It would not surprise me if the premise is inverted, that plants selected for electrostatically charged butterflies by selectively changing nectar availability.

This book gets recommended a lot here but in case you missed it, An Immense World (2022) by Ed Yong contains a ton of examples of animals sensing the world differently than we do - including electrical sensors and different frame rates of acquisition. He doesn't address it but it calls into question in my mind many of the studies about consciousness in other animals that deny its existence, like the mirror test.

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