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Hey, Shortwaveers!

Today we're starting out with the story of the birds and the bees.

No, like the actual birds and the bees.

We're talking pollination.

Okay, quick plant sex ed talk.

Plants reproduce when pollen from a male flowering plant ends up in the female part of a plant.

That fertilization leads to seeds, the embryos of the plant world.

And though a flower can pollinate itself, cross pollination between plants give them the advantage of increased genetic diversity.

Dr. Vivian Solis-Fice says,

for the garden variety land plant, there are two main ways cross pollination can happen.

One is airborne, taken by the wind,

and they eventually end up in the female flower and pollinated.

The second is by insects, in general, is bees or butterflies that are attracted to the male flower?

Vivian studies pollination, but not in any of the plants we grow in our gardens.

So in the ocean, no one ever imagined that there was an animal that could influence this sexual reproduction.

So it was accepted that it went only through water currents.

And it's exactly like with the wind, except it's water.

Vivian and her team discovered pollinators in the ocean for the first time ever.

Today on the show, how Vivian and her team made their landmark discovery,

what underwater plant sex looks like, and why the research is currently unhauled.

I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shartway, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.

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