Wild flowers such as nigella and cornflower are endangered. The lack of pollinators decreases seed production by 20-50%, as revealed by a new study conducted by the University of Pisa
Gorgeous flowers like nigella and cornflower may be rarer and rarer to see. The reason? The worrying decline in bees and other pollinating insects it is causing a drop of 20-50% of the seeds produced.
This is what emerges from a new research conducted at the University of Pisa and just published in the Acta Oecologica journal. Ten years of preliminary studies were required for the study - observations on flora and pollinators, seed collection, germination ecology of the collected species - and two years of actual experimentation.
Inbreeding depression: this is how scholars have defined this phenomenon that puts biodiversity at risk. In short, plants and wild flowers do not tolerate their own pollen and to produce seeds they prefer that coming from other flowers of the same species brought precisely by pollinating insects such as bees, bumblebees or butterflies.
Wild flowers at risk
"The results showed that some species suffer markedly after a first generation from the lack of pollination by pollinating insects - he explains Stefano Welcome, Professor of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Agro-environmental Sciences of the University of Pisa - This is particularly true for those flowers which in evolution have consolidated close 'specialized' mutualist relationships and reciprocal dependence with certain pollinators, conforming their corolla to shape and size of certain pollinators ".
To play a crucial role in this scenario is also the climate crisis, in addition to the interventions of transformation of the natural environment and the massive use of pesticides.
"The excess of anthropization, together with the ongoing climate changes penalize those wild flowers that are the main players in determining the aesthetic-landscape impact of rural environments." - underlines the professor Welcome - Flowers such as larkspur, cornflower, gittaione, wild carnation or nigella carry out a 'silent wellness therapy' through their bright colors during their respective flowering dynamics. The progressive anthropization of the territory that deprives pollinators of ecological spaces, together with an extremely 'simplified' agronomic management, risk determining a sort of progressive 'ugliness' of rural landscapes making them increasingly poor in that chromatic component that we perceive as' beauty '".
But do we really want to give up the extraordinary beauty and above all the usefulness of flowers to make more and more space for the gray of concrete and poison the environment (also harming our health) with pesticides?
Source: Acta Oecologica / University of Pisa
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