An Ingenious Experiment of Jungle Bats and Evolving Artificial Flowers

Here’s a longstanding mystery. Many bats have a sweet tooth, which allows plants to recruit them as pollinators by rewarding them with sugary nectar. Given a choice, these animals prefer their nectar as sickly sweet as possible, with up to 60 percent sugar. But the plants typically offer them a more dilute concoction, with just 20 percent sugar. That’s weird: Plants that produce sweeter nectar ought to be more attractive to pollinators, and so produce more offspring. Over time, nectar should evolve to be exceptionally sweet. But it hasn’t. Why not?

from Humboldt University in Germany have just conclusively solved this mystery, using a set of extraordinary evolutionary experiments that took more than