Humans aren’t the only ones in nature that like a bit of sparkle. Plants are known to have glossy leaves and flowers, fish scales glitter and birds can be iridescent. But does glossiness have a functional use in the plant species that shine?

A recent article published in Science Advances by Dietz et al asks this question for plant flowers and reveals that floral glossiness enhances a bee’s ability to see distant flowers but interferes with color discrimination of nearby flowers.

“We investigate the functional importance of glossiness for visual signaling using a plant-pollinator system,” write Dietz et al in Science Advances. “To understand the impact of surface gloss on flower detection and discrimination by pollinators, we use bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), a model organism in visual ecology.”

In nature, glossy flowers have flat epidermal cells, whereas the matte flowers have cone-shaped cells. This difference in structural biology is responsible for how sunlight is either reflected (glossy) or refracted (matte) at the cell surface. Dietz et al therefore constructed artificial surfaces with reflectance properties similar to glossy (Ranunculus repens, Anthurium andraeanum) or matte (Antirrhinum majus, Cosmos bipinnatus) flowers to test their bees’ preferences.