Pollination via goth butterfly

POLLINATION VIA GOTH BUTTERFLY

Spend some time in the Chihuahua Desert & aside from the abundance of limestone one of the first things you'll notice is a lot of plants have long, narrow tube-shaped white flowers & bloom or at least stay open past dusk.

Oenothera, Mandevilla, Acleisanthes, Amsonia, Datura - all dusk-blooming flowers that are pollinated primarily by moths. Moths are everywhere, but few people ever think of what they're doing or how important they are to the ecology of these fragile, beautiful, rocky places.

Moths do a lot of pollinating in the desert, & in turn they have driven the evolution of a lot of the plants that occur in these places. It's so hot during the day that - if you're a plant - to expose delicate floral tissue to the intense ultraviolet and infrared energy requires some costly evolutionary advancements...or you can just take the easy way out, avoiding the sun altogether & blooming at night.

Salvia whitehousei grows on the undulating limestone hills where the Edwards Plateau starts to turn into the Chihuahua desert. Like many plants here, the leaves are narrow & covered in hairs that make them appear chalky white. Like many moth-pollinated flowers, it has a long narrow tube flower with an opening that's much too small for a bee or fly to crawl inside. Most Salvias are pollinated by bees or hummingbirds, especially, but Salvia whitehousei is pollinated by moths.

As the flowers stay open during the day, they can also surely be pollinated by butterflies or long-tongued flies, but as I photographed this incredibly cool plant from a banger fucking landscape, I heard the pattering hum of sphinx moths, & watched them hit the flowers, hovering like small hummingbirds.

A moth-pollinated Salvia. Moths drove the evolution of one of my favorite genera of plants. I didn't know this when I came out here to look for it. As this is an uncommon plant with a narrow distribution, I didn't see anything regarding moth pollination of this species in the literature. But standing here at dusk in the desert I clearly saw moths pollinating this species. I started laughing. How fucking cool. Evolution is a fantastic beast.