Nature’s recourse
How plants and animals fight back when deals go sour
By Susan Milius
Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skulduggery turns up.
In this sense, cheating means pretty much what it does among people, says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of VU University Amsterdam: One party exploits another, taking more than its fair share or happily reaping benefits without paying the costs. “There is always that one person that orders the most expensive meal on the menu and then insists on splitting the bill evenly,” Kiers says.
Diners in nature don’t always mind their manners, either. A bee that bites through a flower wall for a long, sweet drink of nectar but doesn’t reciprocate by moving pollen, for instance, has cheated the plant. Such nectar snatches violate an evolutionarily ancient arrangement of trading food for pollination.