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Lesser long-nosed bat
A natural pollinator of agave, the plant tequila is made from. Each spring it follows a corridor of blooms from Mexico into southern Arizona, drinking nectar from agaves and columnar cacti such as the saguaro and dusting the next flower with pollen as it goes. Its tongue is roughly as long as its body.
It is also a rare comeback story. About a thousand were thought to remain in the late 1980s; by 2018 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated around 200,000, and it became the first bat taken off the U.S. endangered list because it had recovered. The catch is that agave grown for tequila is harvested before it flowers, to keep its sugars in the plant, so producers who let some plants bloom matter for both bat and plant.
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Cave nectar bat
If you have ever eaten durian, thank a bat. This small Southeast Asian fruit bat roosts in caves and feeds at night on the nectar of durian blossoms.
A 2019 study in Sulawesi kept different visitors away from durian flowers and found that the flowers open to bats set far more fruit than those closed to animals or open only to insects, concluding that bats were the crop's main pollinators. The cave nectar bat visited more flower clusters than the much larger flying foxes and stayed longer at each. The researchers put the value of that bat work at roughly $117 per hectare each fruiting season, a strong argument for protecting the caves where these colonies roost.
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Honey possum
A marsupial that weighs 5 to 10 grams and lives entirely on nectar and pollen, the only mammal outside the bats known to do so. It is found only in the far southwest of Western Australia, where it climbs through banksias and other heath shrubs, lapping nectar with a long tongue tipped in brush-like bristles.
Pollen clings to its snout and fur as it feeds, making it an important pollinator of plants such as Banksia attenuata, Banksia coccinea and Adenanthos cuneatus. With no other food to fall back on, it relies on heath diverse enough to have something in flower all year, so frequent or intense fires and the plant disease Phytophthora cinnamomi threaten it and its plants together.
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Black-and-white ruffed lemur
Often called the world's largest pollinator. In Madagascar's rainforests this lemur feeds on the big flowers of the traveler's tree, Ravenala madagascariensis, pushing its long snout deep inside to reach the nectar and coming away with pollen on its face and fur for the next tree.
Fruit makes up most of its diet, but when fruit is scarce it can spend up to 72% of its foraging time on nectar. The flowers seem shaped to fit a ruffed lemur's face, a sign of how long the two have been evolving together. All three subspecies are listed as Critically Endangered, so the traveler's tree is at risk of losing one of its main pollinators in the wild.
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Ruby-throated hummingbird
The one on this list most gardeners in eastern North America can actually invite over. Red, tubular flowers are the classic hummingbird design, and the cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis, is the clearest example: as the bird probes for nectar, its head hits the anthers and then pollinates the stigma of the next bloom.
In the Northeast, this hummingbird is the only effective pollinator the cardinal flower has, so a garden patch of it is more than decoration. Pair it with other native red tubular plants such as trumpet honeysuckle, a hummingbird favorite, and you give the birds a reason to stop and the flowers the partner they depend on.
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Malachite sunbird
Sunbirds fill the hummingbird's role across Africa, Asia and Australasia, though they usually perch to feed rather than hover. The malachite sunbird of southern Africa shows how far a plant will go to accommodate that habit.
Babiana ringens, the rat's tail of South Africa's Cape, holds its bright red tubular flowers near the ground and sends up a bare, flowerless stalk whose job is to be a perch. The sunbird, its main pollinator, lands there, leans down into the blooms and picks up pollen in just the right spot. Plants whose stalk was removed produced only about half as many seeds, a neat demonstration of how much this one bird is worth to that one flower.
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Blue-tailed day gecko
Lizards, geckos and skinks can pollinate too, and this bright Mauritian day gecko is one of the best-documented cases. It laps nectar from flowers and carries pollen between them, and it has long been described as both pollinator and seed disperser of Roussea simplex, a critically endangered shrub found only on Mauritius.
It is also a cautionary tale. Geckos avoid plants taken over by the invasive white-footed ant, and those plants set noticeably fewer seeds. A later camera-trap study recorded the native Mauritius bulbul visiting the flowers too, so the gecko may share the job, but losing either partner to invasive species leaves one of the island's rarest plants struggling to reproduce.
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Xanthopan
Wallace's sphinx moth, Xanthopan praedicta, and Darwin's orchid
Hawk-moths hover at night and drink through a long coiled proboscis, and this Madagascan species is the most famous of them. Darwin looked at the star orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, whose nectar sits at the bottom of a spur 12 to 18 inches long, and reasoned that some moth must have a tongue long enough to reach it. That moth was not formally described until 1903, and its name, praedicta, honors the prediction.
As the moth works its tongue down the spur, pollen rubs off onto its head and travels to the next flower. Without a tongue that long, the orchid's nectar goes undrunk and its flowers unpollinated: the textbook case of a flower and an animal shaping each other.
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Tegeticula
Yucca moths of the genus Tegeticula
Most pollinators move pollen by accident while feeding. Female yucca moths do it on purpose. Using tentacle-like mouthparts found only in yucca moths, a female gathers a ball of pollen from one yucca flower, flies to another, lays her eggs in its ovary and then packs pollen onto the stigma, so the seeds her caterpillars need will actually develop.
The caterpillars eat some of those seeds and leave the rest, and that trade has made the partnership one of the classic examples of obligate mutualism. Yuccas essentially depend on these moths to set seed, and the moths cannot breed anywhere else, so the loss of one would leave the other with no way forward.
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Aeropetes
The mountain pride butterfly, Aeropetes tulbaghia, and the red disa
Butterflies are not usually picky, but this big brown butterfly of South Africa's mountains is. It is strongly attracted to red, pollinates around 15 red-flowered Cape plants and largely ignores flowers of any other color.
Its most famous partner is the red disa, Disa uniflora, a scentless orchid that grows beside remote mountain streams in the Western Cape and on the upper slopes of Table Mountain, and offers its visitor nectar. Those red flowers are tuned to this one butterfly, and conservationists warn that if it disappeared they would face extinction.
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Fig wasp
A fig is not quite a fruit in the usual sense but an enclosed bundle of tiny flowers, and the only way in is a narrow opening at the tip. Fig wasps are the pollinators small enough to use it. A mated female forces her way through, often losing her wings and most of her antennae, then pollinates the flowers inside while laying her eggs.
The two cannot survive without each other, and many pairings are specific to one fig species and one wasp. The partnership is thought to have begun between 70 and 90 million years ago. Because figs feed so many birds, bats and monkeys in tropical forests, the loss of a single wasp species can ripple well beyond its own tree.
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Hoverfly
The striped insect hovering over your flower bed may not be a bee or a wasp at all. Hoverflies borrow that coloring to deter birds, but they cannot sting, and they are often considered the most important group of pollinators after wild bees, visiting wildflowers and crops alike.
They earn their keep twice. Many hoverfly larvae eat aphids, so the adults pollinating your plants may have spent their early lives protecting them. Radar studies found that up to four billion migrate to and from Britain each year, pollinating many billions of flowers while their larvae eat up to ten trillion aphids. Open, simple flowers such as daisies, yarrow and herbs left to bloom are the easiest way to feed them.
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Forcipomyia
Forcipomyia midges and the cacao tree
Every chocolate bar starts with a fly smaller than a pinhead. The cacao tree's flowers are tiny and so intricately built that they are pollinated mainly by biting midges, with several Forcipomyia species among the most effective.
These midges do not depend on cacao to complete their life cycle. They breed in rotting plant matter, and studies on Costa Rican cacao farms found them in decaying banana trunks and cacao pod husks on the ground, so a messy plantation floor can be worth more than a tidy one.
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Beetle
Beetles and the magnolia
Long before there were bees, there were beetles clambering over flowers, and some plants still keep to that older arrangement. Magnolia is the familiar garden example. Plants recognizably in the magnolia family appear in fossils from about 95 million years ago, and their flowers are thought to have evolved to attract beetles because beetles were around first.
Beetles are clumsy visitors that chew as they go, and magnolia flowers are often damaged by them; the flower's tough carpels are built to take it. Next spring, look inside an open magnolia bloom: the small beetles you may find there are doing a job older than any bee's.
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