Deception and intrigue are not limited to people or even animals. Plants, too, have evolved ways to fool their pollinators, their enemies and even the organisms that disperse their seeds. Now an international team has uncovered trickery in a climbing vine that fooled even them. The black-bulb yam (Dioscorea melanophyma) makes fake berries that help the species spread to new locations, the researchers report January 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The story “feels refreshingly new,” says Kenji Suetsugu, an evolutionary ecologist at Kobe University in Japan who was not involved in the work. These yams have lost the ability to reproduce seeds via sexual reproduction