Pollination is the trademark of flowering plants, with animals such as bees and birds sustaining the world's food supplies.
The seaweed species that depends on small marine crustaceans to reproduce is the first to be documented.
The researchers say their study shows that animal-assisted pollination could have arisen in the ocean 650 million years ago.
On land in seed-bearing flowering plants and gymnosperms, male reproductive cells, or gametes, take flight in the form of pollen grains, which are carried on wind, through water, or a back insect, to hopefully land upon a female counterpart somewhere far away.
mosses and some fungi use animals and insects to facilitate reproduction, upending what they knew about animal-mediated pollination, according to scientists.
It was thought to have started in concert with plants around 140 million years ago.
The long-standing theory that the oceans were devoid of pollinators was thrown a curve ball a few years ago.
A new study from Emma Lavaut, an evolutionary biology graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris, describes how small crustaceans called isopods help fertilize a species of red seaweed.
Jeff Ollerton and Zong write that the study by Lavaut et al. has broadened both the variety and the history of animal-mediated male gamete transfer.
seaweeds are related to plants that are called true plants.
The male gametes of G. gracilis don't have a flagellum to propel them through water unless they can get a ridge on a passing animal.
The small marine isopods inadvertently collect the seaweed's male gametes and transfer them to female plants.
An idotea decorated with fluorescently-stained spermatia suggests that crustaceans may serve as pollinators.
The appendage is covered in spermatia.
For the first time, our results show that biotic interactions dramatically increase the likelihood of fertilization in a seaweed.
The team found that fertilization success was 20 times higher in the presence of I balthica.
They haven't compared the pollination of crustaceans with the dispersal of pollen along water currents.
The researchers only inferred the evolutionary history of the animals involved in the pollination process.
The seaweed provides a lot of food for the idoteas. The small crustaceans help G. gracilis reproduce by eating plants that colonize the seaweed.
Idotea balthica is on a seaweed frond.
In a world of rapid human-caused climate change, the delicate mutualistic relationships between plants and animals are at risk.
When coastlines are being battered by storms and sea levels are rising, seaweeds rely on coastal waters to reproduce. There is a need to study the effects of ocean acidification on isopods.
While the threat of global heating is clear, evolutionary-minded ecologists are still stumped as to what G. gracilis did before I.
According to Ollerton and Ren, how these seaweeds were reproducing before this is a mystery.
Science has taught us that we should always be prepared for more surprises. According to recent estimates from Ollerton, only one-tenth of the 300,000 species of animal-pollinated flowering plants have had their documentation.
Which species are doing their job? Many more revelations await the careful observer of species interactions.
The study was published in a scientific journal.
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