nating of these red flowers, since a visiting 

 beetle carries away nearly 2,000 pollen 

 grains (as opposed to a Lasioglossum bee, 

 for instance, which carries, on average, 

 only 110 poUen grains). 



Red flowers probably have more to 

 offer than food. Red color also advertises 

 sex. Dafni and colleagues noted that the 

 female beetles remained, on average, six- 

 teen minutes in each flower they visited, 

 whereas the males kept moving from 

 flower to flower every three and a third 

 minutes or until they found a female. 

 Upon finding one, they immediately 

 stayed to mate. Are the males searching 

 for females in flowers? 



The fuzzy, little, dark brown beetles 

 with greenish or purplish thoraces are not 

 always common. In one area near Jeru- 

 salem, I examined 1,548 Anemone coro- 

 naria flowers and found twenty-two that 

 contained one beetle and eleven with more 

 than one (primarily copulating pairs). 

 Thus, only one in seventy flowers had a 

 single beetle, whereas every flower with 

 one beetle had a 50 percent chance of hav- 

 ing another beetle. Put another way, a 

 flower's chances of being visited again 

 were thirty-five times greater if it already 

 had a beetle in it. 



I also noted numerous solitary bee 

 males in the genus Eiicera apparently 

 sleeping in flowers. Indeed, under overcast 

 skies, all of these bees stopped foraging 

 and I saw up to six in a single flower. How- 

 ever, 1 never saw them copulating there. 

 Their long antennae — almost as long as 

 their entire body — attest that scent plays a 

 large role in mate finding. In contrast, the 

 antennae of the Amphiocoma beetles are 

 microscopic in size. Although the beetles 

 are nearly three-eighths of an inch long, 

 the lamellae of their antennae are no larger 

 than the dot a sharp pencil makes on paper 

 Their scent-organs seem almost atrophied, 

 but their eyes are not: their attraction to red 

 flowers finds them mates. 



The sexes must meet somewhere. Why 

 not while lounging at conspicuous, well- 

 advertised places? And a female must lay 

 up large protein stores to make eggs. For 

 that she needs to eat pollen. Indeed, on two 

 occasions during my brief survey, I saw 

 male beetles land on flowers containing a 

 beefle I was photographing, and in both in- 

 stances the new beetle instantly attempted 

 to mate with the beetle in the flower. Food 

 rewards were apparently of only sec- 

 ondary concern for the males. 



Thanks to fieldwork by Dafni and elec- 



trophysiological experiments by Randolf 

 Menzel, of the Free University of Beriin, 

 we know that these beetles (unlike most 

 other insects, but like birds) evolved the 

 capacity to see the color red. Once that oc- 

 curred, the beetles could exploit the very 

 conspicuous red signal of the flowers, re- 

 sulting in enhanced mating success for 

 them and for the plants they visited. Al- 

 though we don't know for sure how the red 

 flower guild serviced by beetles evolved, a 

 likely scenario is that the plants imitated 

 one another, and that many new prod- 

 ucts — like so many knockoffs of Swiss 

 Army knives — entered the market, using 

 the same distincive red signal in their ad- 

 vertising campaigns. In this case, the prod- 

 uct being advertised was sex with break- 

 fast in bed — a winning combination. And 

 now the Amphiocoma beetles in the 

 Judean desert enjoy the red carpet treat- 

 ment, while we enjoy the show. D 



The tremendous diversity of flowering 

 plants in the Judean desert is partly 

 the result of the region 's drastic 

 fluctuations in rainfall. In spring, the 

 lush growth of flowering plants 

 contrasts starkly with the treeless hills. 



Allen Rokach 



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