The Secret Loves of Flowers

The Secret Loves of Flowers, By Dino J. Martins

I’m kneeling quietly, staying as still as possible, before a mass of verdant white flowers at the edge of a gorge in a distant, hidden corner in the highlands of Kenya. It is 5.45am. Sunrise is still some thirty-seven minutes away.The eastern edges of the horizon are laced with saffron and drunken crickets rasp intermittently. Larks and robin chats start warming up and in the distance is the forlorn, territorial sawing of a lonely leopard.

A furtive and whirring, soft sighing rustles through the cool, crisp air. Swiftly it moves amid the shadows, more heard than seen, a blurred suggestion of form in the blue-grey stillness before dawn. Then ever so stealthily, with proboscis unfurled, she probes the heart of her unsuspecting, but patient, evolutionary match and is rewarded with a millilitre’s measure of nectar. A cute floral nod and it’s all over. Millions of years of evolution reduced to just a millisecond of mutual pleasure and benefit.

And like all naturalists who have borne witness to nature’s myriad mysteries many times before, I have come to learn and have been blessed with a small discovery.
For the past ten years, I have been studying the intimate interactions between hawkmoths and the flowers that they pollinate. Hawkmoths, also known as Sphinx Moths, are an intriguing and incredible group of insects. Some 1450 different species are found across the world and a hundred species have been recorded in Kenya.

They are fast-flying, long-lived and feed actively from many different kinds of flowers, a fair number of which they alone can pollinate. Despite their relatively high diversity, little is known about their actual role as pollinators and in particular as specialised pollinators of highly-adapted plants, though it is widely estimated that about ten percent of all tropical flowering plant species are pollinated by hawkmoths. Among naturalists, they are known as the quintessential phantoms of the dusk because they emerge, to approach flowers, just as darkness gathers. After hundreds of hours spent waiting to see them, and many thousands of fleeting glimpses of these enigmatic creatures, I’ve learned to avoid looking for them on cold or misty mornings, to stay still, to move slowly and to watch very, very closely as their flower feeds can last less than a few seconds.
Igrew up in Eldoret a small, sleepy and rural town in Western Kenya, and some of my earliest memories are of watching insects. As a child who suffered from the trauma of a broken home, I found refuge in nature. Later on, my love of insects connected me with the most wonderful foster parents who had come to Eldoret to help establish a new teaching hospital and training program for Kenyan doctors. Along the way, our lives came together. My foster mother always says we ‘met through a moth’ as I had been raising giant moths who all hatched out and fluttered about the day she first visited me at home where I was raising the caterpillars. Caring for the caterpillars had provided many happy hours of joy, and had kept me focused and away from thinking too much about what was happening at home and when they hatched, we were both enchanted. My late mother, my foster parents and many wonderful teachers encouraged, nurtured and indulged my love of natural history and after finishing school, I won a scholarship to Indiana University. Routine class and campus life, however, were not my cup of tea, but – thanks to some sympathetic professors – I was able to spend time in the Amazon rainforest and wilds of Kenya, working on independent study and earning a degree in Anthropology and Biology.

Having finished my degree, I returned to Kenya, determined to use my training in anthropology and biology to make a difference in the field of conservation, and to understand more about the incredible natural resources that Kenya is blessed with. My work saw me writing, drawing and exploring different parts of the country, learning from insects and plants and sharing these lessons where I could. But after a few years of feeling beaten down by a corrupt culture of patronage, and finding that it was increasingly difficult to get a footing in conservation without the necessary ‘connections’, I wanted to give up. In addition to these disappointments, I realised that no one really paid much attention to insects, in Kenya or anywhere else, and in conservation circles, most of the funding and attention went to those working on big ‘charismatic’ animals. Once again the wisdom of my foster parents prevailed. ‘Do what you love,’ they said. And I did. I undertook my Masters degree with a world expert in pollination at the University of KwaZulu Natal.This allowed me to continue making the kind of observations about plants and insects that I had loved as a child, and to forge a scientific career with the foundations I had in natural history. After my Masters I spent a few years working as a freelance writer, helping out on research projects, falling in love and making all sorts of mistakes, and then, to my utter amazement, I won a scholarship to Harvard University, where I completed my PhD, looking at the evolution of cooperation and interactions between plants and insects on the African savannah.

My journey to this particular moment of discovery on the edge of a gorge in the Kenyan highlands had, in fact, begun the night before.

On an evening walk with the dogs, I follow a sweet, musky perfume towards the edge of the gorge.The fragrant dusk is filled with sounds and shadows. Crickets, strumming their wings, utter chirps and whistles. A high-pitched silvery squeak, barely within range of human hearing, punctuates the erratic course of a bat overhead. Leaves rustle and branches creak as gentle gusts of breeze move through the forest. Pin-points of light, courting fireflies, flash in the damp depths.
The fragrance grows more powerful with each passing minute and clustered close in the gnarled arms of a dying croton, a spray of white stars, is the source of the delicious scent.
The white stars, softly bright against the dark mottled tree trunk, are orchid flowers: the Comet Orchid, a widespread and abundant species found throughout the highland forests of East Africa. Each flower, crisp and pure white, is a fantastic, marvellous sexual structure.
Three petals and three sepals, as with all orchids, are arranged to form the flower. One of the petals – the ‘lip’ of the orchid – is larger and more complicated than the others and sits between the two lower sepals, pointed and curved, completing the symmetry of the star.

Projecting from behind the orchid’s lip is a long, tubular and tapering spur which contains a precious store of nectar.The spur itself is six inches long and the nectar level, measured from the bottom end of the spur, comes up to barely half the spurs’ length. This means that whatever visits this flower – whatever sips the nectar and hopefully transports the pollen – must be able to reach down with a long, narrow tongue, at least four inches into it .

In the final moments of dusk, when the far western skies are a pale line of fading burnt sienna, the whirring of wings rustles the air above the flowering orchid and, lured closer by the sweet, heady scent, homes in on the white flowers.This is the Convolvulus Hawkmoth.
With its attenuated tongue uncoiled and dangling, quivering, the Convolvulus Hawkmoth hovers in front of the spray of orchids. It probes gently with its extended proboscis and, guided by the symmetrical shape, it reaches effortlessly into the orchid. Its tongue travels down into the spur, drawing the hawkmoth itself closer and closer to the flower. As the tip of its proboscis finds the nectar it drinks deeply.

As the nectar level falls from being swiftly sucked out, the hawkmoth presses itself against the flower. Now the base of its proboscis rubs against a special structure hidden just inside the middle of the flower. Here, waiting patiently, are two pollen masses, known as pollinia, with sticky strands attached to them. The mechanism works perfectly. As the base of the hawkmoth’s proboscis presses against the inside of the flower, the pressure forces the sticky strands onto the hawkmoth’s tongue.

With no more nectar within reach, the hawkmoth pulls away and in so doing brushes up against a sticky strand, known as a viscidium, which holds fast to its proboscis and pulls out the bundle of pollen. The moth hovers backwards, perhaps surprised by the unexpected addition to its long tongue.The pollen masses of the orchid are now firmly fastened to its tongue.
The Convolvulus Hawkmoth probes two more open flowers, then, startled by a flitting bat overhead, swiftly flies off deep into the forest bearing the orchid’s genes with it.This brief and remarkable incident represents an ancient evolutionary relationship between hawkmoth and orchid, successfully played out over millennia in short, three- second acts, time and time again.
Insects and flowers have been intimately involved for hundreds of millions of years. Much of the food that we eat, and much of the food we most enjoy, is a result of their synergy. ‘One in three bites of food is thanks to a pollinator,’ is an oft-quoted refrain today, and some eighty per cent of flowering plants rely on pollinators to reproduce, and survive. Without them, and their symbiosis, our world would be unimaginably poorer and bereft.

Insects almost everywhere in our fragile world are under threat. Bees, butterflies and other pollinators are disappearing at unprecedented rates, in many cases even before we fully understand how important they are. Most research has been done in the temperate, developed countries, but most of the earth’s diversity is located in the tropics, and relatively few scientific lifetimes have been dedicated to understanding the vast, complex web of life here still.
Sadly, now, even the remote reaches of wild Africa are being tainted by poisons designed to kill insects, spread through global trade and the growth of intensive agriculture. For many decades, rural farming systems across East Africa have been relatively free of toxic pesticides, but in recent years access and use is increasing. While managing pests is important, and farmers should have access to agricultural inputs and technology, how, where and when these are used does matter. One of the most alarming trends is the dumping of highly toxic pesticides across Africa, which have been banned elsewhere, and are shipped and ‘donated’ to unsuspecting farmers and government agencies across the continent. Exact data is hard to come by, given the skulking shady deals that make up these transactions, but the UN estimates that many tens of thousands of tonnes of chemical pesticides are being disposed of in the region.

Anyone who slurps down coffee or nibbles on chocolate needs to be grateful to insect pollinators. Nuts, fruits, seeds, vegetables, spices andmany other kinds of nutritious foodstuff fromaround the world are on our tables thanks to the tireless efforts of these creatures,and we all benefit by learning more about how this works. In farmers fields’ across the world I have had the immense joy of learning to see, and helping others learn to see, the importance of pollinators. Over the past decade that I’ve spent back in Kenya following the completion of my PhD, I’ve been working directly with rural farming communities as part of my role with Nature Kenya, a scientific society that works to ‘Connect People and Nature’. Many farmers are suitably sceptical when I start waxing about the importance of insects. For those who will indulge me, I ask that we look at their crop in flower together. Often, even when many hours and years have been spent tilling and toiling with plants, the essentials of plant sex have often gone unnoticed.

This is no fault of the farmers.The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden, and often so brief, that if you literally blink, you might miss what exactly is going on. But when we stand together, sometimes even holding just a single flower, there is a constant, deep, ancient magic that I can summon. In a moment, when we are watching, an insect will appear. We watch it perch, wriggle, probe, prod and nibble. And the spell is cast. And a revelation that this humble act is what puts food on the table, the money in the bank, the taste and flavour into each meal, and indeed the succour for each and every life. And one of the truly greatest joys of my life has been returning to farms where farmers have learned to cherish these humble insects, marvelling at hundreds of happy bees and butterflies dancing in the sunlight and the air literally humming with joy. The smiles on the faces of farmers with higher yields and healthier farms and families, and the satisfaction that as a mere scientist I can make a small difference in the world for both people and pollinators.

For tens of millions of years hawkmoths and orchids have been choregraphing their own co-evolutionary dance. The hawkmoth is rewarded with nectar, potent fuel for its fast-paced high-energy lifestyle, while the orchid gets a chance to send its pollen off to another orchid. Somewhere distant in the forest, where when deposited on the sticky stigma of another flower, it will lead to the production of a seedpod and the perpetuation of the species.

Africa and her islands have a unique abundance of hawkmoth- pollinated plants, and if they disappear, then so will the plant species that they pollinate. Indeed, moths are among the most important pollinators in the insect world with a recent study showing that in the United Kingdom, moths move more pollen around at night between different plants than bees and butterflies during the day. Some 1450 species of hawkmoths have been described to date across the world, with about a hundred species known from Kenya alone. One African/Madagascan hawkmoth, Morgan’s Sphinx (Xanthopan morgani) is legendary among students of evolution.

In the 1850s Charles Darwin, observing flowers growing in an English hothouse, puzzled over the magnificent Angraecum sesquipedale, a Malagasy Orchid with an incredibly long spur – up to twelve inches long! Darwin predicted that a hawkmoth, with a similarly attenuated proboscis, would most likely be the pollinator of this remarkable flower. Of course, this was dismissed as improbable folly as no one could imagine the existence of such a fabulously endowed creature. Some decades later, a hawkmoth with just such a proboscis was discovered – a subspecies of Morgan’s Sphinx which was named Xanthopan morgani praedicta, the subspecies epithet ‘praedicta’ honouring Darwin’s remarkable foresight.

Darwin made extensive observations around the mysteries of orchid flowers, and wrote an entire book about them with an apt, if lengthy, title: ‘On The Various Contrivances By Which British And Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised By Insects, And On The Good Effect Of Intercrossing,’ which was published in 1862. In it, and in great and delightful detail, he dissects and philosophises around the intriguing structure of orchid flowers.

Darwin’s astute, detailed observations, keen naturalists’ eye and sense of reverence for nature and the world around him are something that all naturalists share through the ages. However, this is not something unusual or special: we are all naturally naturalists; and Indigenous peoples and those who live close to nature the world over have known for ages. Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, rural farmers and anyone who takes the time to humbly, quietly and consistently watch the world around them shares in this purposed gift. It is absolutely essential that as we work to save species and habitats, that we also address the issues of the knowledge that we do already have, handed down through the ages in song, dance, poetry, legend and stories, is also cherished and celebrated.

However, in the century-and-a-half since Darwin’s initial observations, still remarkably few people have actually observed long-tongued hawkmoths pollinating orchids, especially the very long spurred species.This makes every observation I make during my studies slightly dizzying and I sometimes find myself holding my breath when a moth drifts close to a flower that I’ve been watching. I stand aching with hope that it will perform its evolutionary dharma.
The furtive pollinating visits are brief, take place in the dark and often the orchid flowers are located on plants dangling high in trees in remote, inaccessible and dangerous places as a result of environmental degradation. For instance, in some areas the plants survive, clinging to rocks or a lone tree, but the forest and its citizens around them have been hacked, burned, boiled, snared, logged, looted and disappeared. In others decades of floods and long, hot droughts have disrupted flowering cycles, and so some years the flowers appear, but there are no moths; in others an abundance of moths, but alas no suitable flowers.

Over the forty plus years I’ve spent watching insects and plants, this I have learned: our minds are made for natural history; our souls are sculpted for nature’s wonders.
Today I live in the vast, wild landscape of the Laikipia Plateau, north of Mount Kenya. As part of the Mpala Research Centre, I work with hundreds of students and scientists from around the world and one of the key things that unites their many different ways of looking at nature is the first and humble step of recognising what they are looking at, and where and when. Seeing the details and the backdrop both together and separately are essential for science, and crucial for students of ecology and evolution.

To some it seems remarkable that I can name hundreds of different species and understand intricate, intimate details of their lives from just a few minutes of observations. But truly, it isn’t really that remarkable. Evolution and natural selection have gifted us all with the ability to see details, to tell different species apart, over many millennia.We Absolutely NeededTo KnowTo Survive. Colour Matters. Shapes Matter. Scent Matters.We are shaped by time and many generations to see, feel, think, connect and be part of the world around us. Even though we entered this play late, with just a few million years of adaptation behind us, we are nonetheless part of the script.