Tim Lowe

By investing heavily in pollination, they can evolve to survive climate change without moving around.

And of course, they don't want to move because the soil varies and not as well adapted if they travel 20, 50, 100 kilometres.

If we think of the places with the best wildflowers, they're infertile.

Southwestern Australia is a classic example of that.

Achaea, Spanxia, Eucalyptus, the other plants, they often have very small distributions.

Now these plants are very often pollinated by birds as well as insects.

Come over to eastern Australia, you can find large numbers of eucalypts with distributions that can be very large or very small, soils mostly infertile.

Now we know from genetic studies that eucalypt species often exchange pollen in ways that help them adapt to change.

Now if you're a bird, nectar is a very easy food to find.

A blossoming banksia or eucalypt, that's much easier to find than insects hidden among leaves and bark.

One of these flowering plants, it can sustain a bird for weeks.

But other birds roaming through the landscape, they're going to find that flowering shrub or tree.

The end result will be lots of birds all wanting that nectar and fighting over access.

These are circumstances where it helps to be aggressive.

You don't need any skill to find a large flowering plant, but a violent disposition will help you maintain control.

So you find this all over the world that nectar feeding birds are aggressive.

Hummingbirds, considered very aggressive by North American bird watchers.

And because Australia has got so much infertile soil, it's got more bird-pollinated plants than any other region, and it has the largest nectar birds, and they do a lot of fighting.

So, as we know, you can stand under a flowering eucalypt and see and hear fight after fight, different species of honey eater, and then jabbing by lunging, lunging by lorikeets as well.

You don't see anything like that in Europe or North America.