Mario Vallejo-Marín

speaker

41 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Mario Vallejo-Marín’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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What The Duck?! · Dinosaur died. No flowers at funeral · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

When you are pollinated by wind, you need to produce tons and tons of pollen.

But if you are pollinated by a very precise pollinator, then you can save those resources and invest them in something else.

It also prevents your pollen ending up in the wrong species, which can be a waste.

So you can now produce similar colors that attract similar pollinators and ensure that pollinator moves just between plants with flowers of the same color and so on.

So I think that this surely played an important role in allowing plants to coexist and therefore diversify and become more species rich.

That is true.

And then later on in their evolutionary history, they make food for pollinators.

They make nectar, a product that is exclusively there for the biotic interactions, mostly with pollinators.

So it is costly.

But I imagine that these costs were offset by the huge benefits of having reproduction that is maybe more reliable or more precise.

Another of them is genome duplication.

And when you have two copies of the same genes everywhere, this gives you a little bit of flexibility that you can start experimenting with using those extra copies to explore other parts of the morphology and the physiology of the plant.

For example, flowering plants have this type of photosynthesis that makes it very efficient at high temperatures.

So like grasses came up with this type of photosynthesis and that now are able to live in places where maybe other groups of plants struggle a little bit more.

And they're therefore able to live in environments that are drier or wetter or more seasonal and so on.

So there are all these leaf traits, vegetative traits that could be important.

They can be towering trees or miniature plants that colonize even aquatic environments.

There are many other mechanisms that have been suggested for what makes flower implants successful.

It is hard to know which one or which combination of features were the ones that allowed that first key advantage of flower implants.

They are like the most diverse group of plants in the planet.

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