Trifolium Clover - How to Understand Plants-Pollinators Mutualistic Relationship (Bagaimana Memahami Hubungan Mutualisme Tumbuhan - Agen Penyerbuk))

 

Is it The True Mutualism or Mutualism Dependency on Plants-Pollinators Case? 

(Part 1-English Version)

(Picture taken by Faisal Anggi Pradita on June 9th, 2022 at 12:00 near Warsaw University of Life Sciences area; captured blue butterfly pollinated the Lotus corniculatus flower)

Today (13/6), as usual in the morning ‘rituals’ I read one or two let’s say chapter of scientific book that I want. It’s useful for me even my reading patterns always jump from one to another book (Please, don’t try it isn’t a reading skill but kind of unproper reading management. Shortly, in sub-chapter of restoration ecology book published by Blackwell science (2005) with editor Jelte van Andel and James Aronson mainly in Chapter 4: Ecosystem, page 55-56 (trophic interactions sub-chapter). There is an argumentative sentence that attracts me with quotation “Plant-pollinator interactions can be considered as non-symbiotic mutualism”.

For the first time, since I was an elementary school student knowing the fact that pollinators have “friendship” relation with flowering plants added the reliable images from book, internet, or even we see with our own eyes when honeybees pollinate the flowers. It’s hard to believe the above notion. However, as a learner (of course, we’re a learner during the whole life period), I need to put the first argument about non-symbiotic mutualism in the one side and the old argument which opposites from another one in the other side.

Analyzing both notions isn’t quite easy but why not to try? I cited the next sentence from that book arguing “The most basic evolutionary outcome that is common across both plants and pollinators is the efficiency of both in exploiting what is for each a valuable or critical resource”. Now, it’s rather comparable judgement from two versions of mutualistic relation between plants and pollinators. But a gap of knowledge occurs in the sentence and question may arise to develop true meaning of mutualistic case. For instance, “how to know or measure our plants give their best nectar to bees and how to check if the pollinators help our plant to set their fruits?”.

The questions are dilemmatic issues because observing the process is harder than enjoying the pollination impacts as we are happy to see our melon fruits from cultivated plants. Because as we know from many literature sources that more than 90% of flowering plants involve pollinators either partly or fully to develop fruits. Due to this reason, therefore I said once it is a gap not only because our shortage knowledge but also the equipment and formula to calculate the efficiency of pollination is still developing so that we can assume and probably our or book’s assumptions are mostly correct in detail (when we observe pollination processes from the beginning till the harvesting period).

Interestingly, this is science where multi-side assumptions can take over during the space and time and one side may be correct for now, but we cannot expect till longer time. Ups, I forgot that it’s still the first part of this debatable title that I write. We need to explore altogether supporting papers or information about this topic. The ideas as “Pollination efficiency, how much pollinators can ‘eat’ natural sugar sources from one flower, is it important or not to know flowering phenologies from plants, how relate this phenomenon with the agricultural, and ecological point of view (this is prospective thinking of our future science), and many more” should be kept in our mind.

Next time, let’s collect some papers firstly and show up the idea of plant-pollinator case so we can now the limitations of mutualistic case in this natural phenomenon. Hopefully, this writing can develop our better wisdom to manage the nature based on stochastic processes that Allah created long time ago. Indeed, Allah is maintaining his living creature to be understood by human how perfect his creature.