For many plants, flowers play a vital role in reproduction. Natural selection hones them in competition against other plants to get pollinated most efficiently. Plants that have similar pollinators have similar problems to solve, and so develop similar solutions. So you would expect that plants pollinated by birds, or specifically hummingbirds, would share characteristics. So plants seeking to attract hummingbirds will often have red flowers. They produce larger quantities of dilute nectar, and long tubular flowers to draw in the birds close with their long beaks and tongues. They also have flexible pedicels, which are a puzzle.

A pedicel is the short stalk that holds the flower away from the rest of the plant. If it were rigid, then it would hold the flower up. But in columbines, the pedicel is flexible so it droops downward. This feature evolved not just once, but many times in plants attracting hummingbirds as pollinators. This is odd, because the hummingbirds don’t like it. Dr Eric LoPresti said he noticed this while working on another project. “I worked on a mutualistic relationship between Aquilegia eximia and several predatory bugs during my dissertation and as such, I spent a huge amount of time across several field seasons sitting in patches of this columbine and because of this time spent, I was able to make so many observations of animals interacting with the columbines. ”

“While I was sitting in patches of columbine, mostly counting dead insects for days on end, hummingbirds would be buzzing around, feeding and chasing each other out of the patch. They usually quite nonplussed that I was around and I was often able to observe them at very close range as they nectared. I noticed that they had this very consistent behavior where they levered the flower up during feeding.”