Most plants advertise their readiness to mate.
Their showy flowers attract insects or other animals that distribute pollen for the price of a little nectar. The plant and its insect pollinators have hooked up with a lizard to evolve an ingenious three-tiered system of reproduction. The pollen and reproductive parts of each flower on the bush are locked up within a 'calyptera', a fused cap of petals that, like a chastity belt, keeps pollinators out. Unfortunately this cap also holds the seeds inside, where they can't germinate. So the flower solves its problem with 'hired help', researchers Mats Olsson, Richard Shine and Elisabeth Ba'k-Olsson have found.