Probing Question: Why are Flowers Beautiful?By Lisa Duchene, Research/Penn State, 1/24/2008
…People love flowers for their array of colors, textures, shapes and fragrances. But is pleasing the human eye the purpose of nature's floral design?
Hardly. Survival is the plant's top priority, reminds Claude dePamphilis, a Penn State plant evolutionary biologist and principal investigator of the Floral Genome Project.
"The beauty of the flower is a byproduct of what it takes for the plant to attract pollinators," said dePamphilis. "The features that we appreciate are cues to pollinators that there are rewards to be found in the flower."…
To aid insects in finding the nectar — and thus, the pollen — many flowering plants have evolved to possess bright colors (hummingbirds and butterflies favor reds and yellows), as well as "nectar guides" that may only be visible in ultraviolet (UV) light—a wavelength of the light spectrum bees can see and people cannot. From a bee's-eye-view, the UV colors and patterns in a flower's petals dramatically announce the flower's stash of nectar and pollen...
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