Hello again!
Let’s get going to another random science fact, and can this one be considered delicious? Let’s see!
Chocolate is a crowd pleaser… Almost everybody loves, and almost everybody craves for a tiny piece of it. It can be flavoured, sweet, stuffed with other delicious things, but the smell of chocolate is probably more delicious than the flavour itself!
But there is a unique plant with a name almost as delicious as its smells: chocolate cosmos. If that was the name of an actual chocolate bar, it would probably sell by the hundreds.
The plant is pretty rare, being in the top 10 rarest flowers in the world. The petals are dark like chocolate, and its fragrance is just like a piece of dark chocolate.
There is not much information about why or how this plant evolved to smell like chocolate or if it’s just a coincidence. But that got us thinking; how and why do flowers smell?
Flowers usually have a strong odour, so their pollinators can recognize them and help them to reproduce. The scent also changes accordingly to their pollinator; Sweet-scented flowers tend to be pollinated by bees and flies, while muddy or musty and spicy-smelling flowers are usually pollinated by beetles.
Flowers will smell the strongest when they are entirely ready for pollination, and that moment is typically synchronized with when the pollinators are most active in nature.
The time of the day also plays a part in how strong a flower smells. Flowers that smell during the day are pollinated by butterflies, bees, or flies. Flowers with the most pungent smell at night are usually pollinated by moths, bats, or other nocturnal pollinators.
When we read this kind of things we are reminded how Nature is actually quite perfect!
