Thought for the Week: Monkshood
Malcolm Edmunds reflects on remarkable adaptation
As I took the small vase of flowers to Meeting last summer I noticed that three of the six spikes of monkshood flowers were upside down. Monkshood has deep blue flowers and is closely related to the equally poisonous delphinium, but it has a large petal on the upper side of the flower shaped like the cowl of a monk – hence the common name. The flower is beautifully adapted to being pollinated by bumblebees, which land on the base of the flower between the four lower petals (OK, botanists, I know these are technically sepals), surrounded by the stamens which dust them with pollen. The insect then reaches upwards with its long tongue to the nectaries high up under the hood. If it then visits a more mature flower in which the stamens have withered it will inadvertently deposit some of the pollen on the stigmas.
Other solitary bees and honeybees do not have a long enough tongue to reach the nectaries so they rarely visit the flowers. The hood-shaped upper petal also protects the sexual organs from the rain; but why did three of the six spikes have upside-down flowers?
Well, three of the flower spikes, which I cut, had thick stems and the flowers were normal with the hood uppermost, but the other three had thin stems and the weight of the large flowers caused them to hang down so that the flowers would be expected to have the hood at the bottom where any rain would fill it with water. However, although the stem was hanging down the flowers were all right way up. What had happened is that the flower buds were sufficiently heavy to cause the stem to bend down but then the flower stalks grew differentially on the upper and lower sides so that they rotated to bring the hood back to the top as the flowers opened fully and the flowers’ sexual organs were protected from rain. What a remarkable adaptation – and all done with no trace of a nervous system, let alone a brain and conscious thought.
We humans are not so very different from monkshood in that most of our everyday actions are automatic, either because they are innate or because we have learned them so that little or no conscious thought is required to carry them out. Yet we have the most highly developed brain of any animal. While we are becoming increasingly aware of the damage we are doing to our environment are we actually doing enough to minimise the harm that we inadvertently do?
We need to engage our wonderful brain much more than most of us do to be aware of the suffering and needs of people around us and of the environment that we are all too rapidly destroying beyond repair.
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