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Botany植物学

Summoned by screams尖叫的召唤

The ways plants attract pollinators can be strange indeed植物吸引传粉昆虫的方式真的很奇特

Oct 8th 2016 | From the print edition2016年10月8日 | 摘自印刷版

Come into my parlour快来我家做客

THE botanical kingdom is rife with deceivers. Carrion flowers mimic the smell of rotten meat in order to attract scavenging beetles and flies and then cover them in pollen. Passion vines, beloved by some butterflies as food for their caterpillars, have yellow spots on their leaves that make them look as if they have already had an egg-laying visit from a gravid female. And numerous carnivorous plants lure insects with sweet odours, only to devour them. Now Stefan Dötterl and Annemarie Heiduk, of the Universities of Salzburg and Bayreuth respectively, think they have uncovered yet another form of deception. As they describe in Current Biology, a vegetable called the parachute plant uses chemical signals to trick carnivorous flies into believing the insects those flies prey on are lying wounded inside it.

植物王国里到处都是骗子。腐肉花会发出腐肉的气味，以吸引嗜腐甲虫和苍蝇，使它们沾上花粉。西番莲是一些蝴蝶幼虫非常喜爱的食物，它的叶子上带有黄色的斑点，看起来就像是雌虫产下的卵。此外，还有大量的食虫植物会散发出香甜的气味引诱昆虫，只为了吞噬它们。现在分别来自萨尔茨堡大学和拜罗伊特大学的StefanDötterl和Annemarie Heiduk认为他们发现了另一种形式的骗局。正如他们在《当代生物学》中所描述的那样，有一种伞状被称为醉龙的植物，会释放化学信号来诱使食肉苍蝇相信它们捕食的猎物正躺在花朵内。

Parlour： n. 客厅Botanical： adj. 植物学的Rife with： 充斥着Deceiver： n. 欺人者Pollen： n. 花粉Caterpillar： n. 毛虫Odours： n. 气味parachute plant ：醉龙(一种蝇媒花)

At first sight parachute plants, which have cone-shaped flowers (see picture) decorated inside with needlelike inward-pointing hairs, look as though they might be carnivorous themselves. They are not, though they come close to it. Insects that enter a parachute-plant flower fall into a pit of pollen and cannot escape past the needle-hairs until the flower begins to wilt—by which time they are thoroughly covered in the stuff

.醉龙第一眼看上去长得像食肉植物，锥形的花上长有像针一样指向内部的纤毛(如图所示)。虽然醉龙长得很像食肉植物，但它并不是。进入到醉龙花朵内的昆虫会落入到花粉坑中，直到花开至荼靡时，它们才能越过纤毛逃出去，而那时它们已经浑身涂满了花粉。

cone-shaped： 锥形的wilt： v.(使)枯萎

That raises the question of why those insects go inside in the first place, for parachute-plant flowers do not smell of any of the conventional odours, sweet or rank, that plants employ to attract attention. To answer that, the two researchers asked themselves two other questions: exactly which insects do parachute flowers attract and what volatile chemicals, if any, do those flowers produce

这就出现了一个问题，这些伞形的植物没有发出任何以往常见的气味——无论是香甜的还是恶臭的味道，去吸引昆虫的注意，那这些昆虫为什么会跑到花内呢为了回答这个问题，两个研究员就以下两个问题进行了思考：究竟是哪些昆虫会受到这些植物的吸引如果有的话，那些花儿产生的又是哪种挥发性化学物质

Rank： adj.恶臭的Volatile：adj. 挥发性的

By collecting the victims of many wild parachute plants Dr Dötterl and Ms Heiduk discovered that most of the trapped insects were flies of the genus Desmometopa, a group with a predilection for sucking up vital fluids that leak out of honey bees as their bodies are pierced by the fangs of spiders. Meanwhile, collecting chemicals given off by the flowers and running them through a gas chromatograph showed a combination of four molecules—2-heptanone, geraniol, 2-nonanol and (E)-2-octenyl acetate—previously unknown in plants. When Dr Dötterl and Ms Heiduk caught some foraging bees, stuck them in test tubes and poked them with the tip of a glass pipette to mimic a spider attack, the bees produced exactly these four compounds. And when the two researchers set traps containing the four chemicals out in the wild, they instantly attracted a goodly haul of Desmometopa.

收集许多野生伞状植物的猎物后，Dötterl博士和Ms Heiduk 博士发现大多数被困的昆虫都是塞氏纹额叶蝇属的，它们嗜食被蜘蛛的毒牙刺穿的蜜蜂所渗出的蜂蜜。同时，他们通过收集鲜花上的化学物质并利用气相色谱仪分析出它是由从未在植物中发现的四种分子所组成，包括2-庚酮，香叶醇，2 -壬醇以及(E)-2辛烯基-醋酸。Dötterl博士和Ms Heiduk 博士抓了一些正在捕食的蜜蜂，将它们放入试管并用玻璃吸管的尖端刺破它们来模仿蜘蛛的攻击，随后这些蜜蜂就释放出了这四种化合物。两位研究员在野外利用这四种化学物质设计了一个陷阱，立刻就吸引了一大批的塞氏纹额叶蝇。

Victim: n.受害者Predilection：n.偏好suck up：吸收Forage: v.捕食

An examination of past apiological research showed that the compounds in question are already known to students of bees. The insects’ mandible glands produce 2-heptanone when they are attempting to bite predators, and this chemical has a debilitating effect on such threats to the hive as predatory moth larvae and mites. The other three compounds, meanwhile, are signal molecules released by bees fighting for their lives, to notify colony members of the danger. Together, then, these four substances are a good indication of a honey bee in the sort of trouble that is a dinner gong to Desmometopa.

读者试译)That parachute plants have evolved to mimic this gong is yet another example of the deceptive power of plants.过去的蜂科研究表明这些化合物早在对蜜蜂的试验中就已经被大家所熟知。当这些昆虫尝试去攻击捕食者时，它们的下颌腺会生成2 -壬醇，这种化学物质能降低蛾类幼虫和螨类这样的蜂巢侵略者攻击性的作用。(期待您的翻译)这种伞状植物通过模仿这种化合物来吸引塞氏纹额叶蝇，成为了植物具有欺骗力的另一证据。

Predator: n.掠夺者Debilitate: v.使...衰弱Hive：n. 蜂巢