Ann Jones
speaker
552 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Ann Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They started it.
Plants...
They have a few ways of dividing their sexual function.
There are species that have male and female plants.
So cannabis is one of the most famous examples where you have female plants that only ever bear female flowers and male plants that only ever bear male flowers and they can only mate male to female.
On the other end of the spectrum, fully hermaphrodite plants, where each flower is capable of female and male function.
So they produce pollen, but they also accept pollen and produce seeds.
They're doing both the male thing and the female thing.
So most plants are hermaphrodites.
Plants can...
fertilise themselves between flowers on the same plant or even within the same flower, that's selfing.
There's an evolutionary imperative to avoid selfing, and there's lots of different ways to do that.
But one particularly interesting way, I think, is they can actually manipulate pollinator behaviour to avoid moving pollen within the same plant.
Tobacco plants produce many flowers per plant.
They're all flowering at the same time.
So there's opportunities to self within the same plant.
But they lace their nectar with nicotine.
And it turns out that hummingbirds really dislike nicotine.
nicotine they can learn to tolerate it but they don't like the taste so they'll have a little sip and then they're kind of out of there they're going to try something else whereas if that nectar wasn't laced with nicotine they'd sit there and they drink up the whole flower and then move on to the next whole flower and they drink up all the nectar once again whereas if you can persuade your pollinator not only to visit your flowers but to rack off quickly then you're more likely to be exporting pollen
You don't actually require much mixing.
Showing 161–180 of 552 · page 9 of 28
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