Pollination

When the cold receded, the Saguaro came back to Arizona thousands of years faster than the ironwood. Why? Birds. Birds can migrate hundreds or thousands of miles dropping seeds from the saguaro fruit along the way. Ironwood seeds are also eaten and pooped out by pack rats which have small domains of a mile or more.

But first, plants need pollinators. In the desert, these are bats, insects, and bees. They are genetic networkers for the plants they forage. They will forage up to 4 miles and periodically, the whole hive will strike out and find a new place to resettle. Which makes me think of computer networks and networking software, site visits like to a blog and social media. Insects with a queen are really one organism. Grouped together, I image a hive to be the size of a small dog. A small dog with 10,000 stingers. I have encountered a hive on the move while hiking. I heard them before I saw them. I always give them space and respect because they can be aggressive. Our bees down here are Africanized, Africanized hybrids, aggressive, but are immune to the fungus that is killing bees elsewhere.

Wings flapping at twice the speed of any other bird with 360 degrees of vision and energy, enough to stay in flight for 50 minutes at a time. Imagine the invisible swirls of air currents churned up around it. The tiny, squeaky chirp is the actual frame of the piece represented by graphic sound waves that you might find in an audio program. The X’s in the piece are a comment on the path a bird may take throughout the day. Hiking through the desert, the dull ring of silence may only be broken by the gravel crunching under your boots. Even if nothing seems to move, you will undoubtedly encounter a hummingbird. You will undoubtedly hear their high-pitched tweets.

Flowering plants have symbiotic relationships with pollinators, but I was thinking about the cereus and its relationship with night. The timing of the moon cycles, quietly glowing shadows and moon light being the first light to illuminate the tissue paper thin petals. I was thinking about those tissue paper thin petals unfolding in the moon light, the first light to reflect back their pure whiteness. Overlaid in the background is a target, personal space symbols and a dotted diagram of moon craters. During the summer in the Southwest, there is great celebration centered on the Night Blooming Cereus. There is a great variety including the Queen of the Night that blooms only once a year; catching these lotus-like blooms on their special night is a real treat.
The specimen depicted in my piece resides in my back yard. Blooming at night makes sense, when your main pollinator is bats. This succulent spreads out low along the ground, usually under shrubs or trees. It is not a Queen of the Night and blooms multiple times a year.

Rain is usually sourced by a Pacific hurricane or tropical storm coming inland to die. Hardy, adaptive plants, like the ocotillo, growing in an area with less rain may look young but can actually be very old. How old? Sometimes more than 100. In between rains, an ocotillo dials its metabolism down to a crawl and appears to be a bundle of dead, spiny sticks. When it rains, it springs into action by sprouting leaves and bright red, torch-like blooms. Pollinators, like carpenter bee and hummingbird, are attracted to the blooms. This ocotillo was found in the Gran Desierto de Altar at the foot of the Sierra del Rosario Mountains. I was taken by the height of the ocotillos in this area compared to most of the shorter, ground-hugging plants and the sound of wind through their spiny branches.

Territories filled with targets of seed bearing plants and rodent trails. Safety is staying outside the margins and sometimes below the ground’s surface. I imagine these invisible zones growing and shrinking from minute to minute as creatures hunt and hide. Plants set up slower seasonal margins of fruiting and flowering, as well as being a home to birds, lizards, insects and rodents. If you can see these invisible margins, you realize the dynamic interconnections of the desert biome. The overlay frame is made of word processor icons: center, list and margin.

The Mohave Rattlesnake is the most venomous and hottest to strike of snakes in the Sonoran Desert. That being said, her symbiotic relationship with rodents is immeasurably important to the ecosystem. She is just doing her job very well.

Most Sonoran Desert plants rely on animals to move their pollen from one to another. And most of these pollinators are small, low energy-demanding insects; but there are notable exceptions to this. Columnar cacti and paniculate agaves, for example, rely strongly on relatively large, energy-demanding hummingbirds and nectar-feeding bats as their major pollinators. This image shows a nectar-feeding bat, Leptonycteris yerbabuenae, visiting the inflorescence of the century plant, Agave palmeri, for a tongueful of nectar. It will repeatedly visit these and other agave flowers each night and will sometimes carry pollen several kilometers between plants.

“Plants are surrounded by many possibilities; evolutions toward successful symbiotic relationships have become quite diverse and are amazingly creative. There are many vectors to pollination that include wind, water, insects, butterflies, birds, bats, and other animals that visit the flower. Working with specialized camera equipment, I seek to capture the energetic dance of bees as they visit and unintentionally pollinate the flowering plants around us. In this particular photo a digger bee (Family: Anthropodidae) finds a moment of rest within the flower of a ladyfinger cactus (Echinocereus pentalophus) surrounded by vibrant colors and a profusion of golden pollen grains.”

“My work is intimately involved with the exchanges of energy between the dwellers of the

Sonoran Desert whether animal, insect or flora.”

“I can’t think of anything to say about flowers that doesn’t sound trite – except that they continue to fascinate and instruct.”

“What do you envision when you hear the word moth? Most people would think of pests, ugly brown winged creatures, or imagine their favorite sweater ruined by tiny holes.

Preconceived notions aside, moths are extraordinary creatures that roam this entire planet. They pollinate flowers and assist in sustaining ecosystems by providing a source of nourishment to animals higher up on the food chain. However, what I feel to be most important, is that they are thought of as an ‘indicator species’ which help humans detect vital changes in our environment.

With there being so many in existence, it’s fascinating to me how little we as humans think about them. And why should we? Most of the time we experience them in their most unfortunate light- literally when flying into streetlights, or when they’ve made their way into our homes.

Though these creatures have a bad rep for being considered ‘gross’ and a nuisance, they’re quite remarkable. Just like their sister the butterfly, they progress through four phases of life. The final ‘adult’ phase is what I’m interested in emphasizing with these pieces because it is the most recognizable, while at the same time typically the shortest in their metamorphosis. And though it may be brief, it’s the most powerful in their life story because it’s the stage that allows them to continue their legacy on this planet.”

I am an allergy sufferer. My take on pollen… Have you ever wandered out at night and shown a flashlight high in the sky? It is startling, the swirl of dust and pollen that floats through the air and just how much there is!

“Bees play a vital role in the perpetuation of life within the Sonoran Desert bioregion. Their work as pollinators ensures a new generation of plants and seasonal fruits, many of which are consumed by native wildlife as well as humans. Bees pollinate roughly 80% of the flora in the Sonoran Desert. Without bees, many native plant species would disappear, forever changing the landscape. Bees themselves benefit from the pollen they sew. This protein rich food source nourishes bees and their larva, and the sweet nectar they consume provides them with a quick boost of energy. Much of a bee’s activity goes unnoticed. They selflessly go about their business without adulation or fanfare. In Sonoran Keystone, I imagine bees that are much more noticeable. Bees that leave a contrail of colorful pollen as they fly through our desert sky illuminating the vital work they perform to sustain our ecosystem.”