Some flowers force visitors to stay against their will. The mechanisms tend to be really cool... and quite diverse.
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As the dine-and-dash community well knows, why pay if you don't have to? Many flowers offer visual and scent-based promises on which they don't deliver.
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Plant life is hard--first you have to find a distributor for your pollen; if that works, you still have to line up a seed-carrier!
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Many caterpillars are picky eaters--often because they have found workarounds to the poisonous tactics of a specific plant's leaves.
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Many flowers move, often in order to avoid (and if all else fails, cause) self-pollination. Watching a flower over several days can reveal intricate choreography.
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We envision pollinators cheerfully going from flower to flower but sometimes the pollinator stays... forever. 'Manslaughter' also occurs-deaths of 'irrelevant' visitors.
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New species arise when a group follows two different paths. I'm fascinated by closely related wildflowers with striking differences in pollination machinery.
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They bloom at similar times and often the same areas, but have strikingly different flowers and fruits. Common names include yellow mandarin and spotted mandarin, or yellow fairy bells and spotted fairy bells. Similar because they’re cousins. Different because…?
Named after resemblance to an exquisitely carved pipe (such as Meerschaums). Flies enter an invitingly rancid tunnel mouth and traverse the passageway to the deepest part of the flower, only to discover that no delightful rotting food awaits… and there’s no way out.
Jacks are wild. There are male and female ‘jacks’. Both deceive: they offer no reward. Both kidnap, but females (sometimes called Jill-in-the-Pulpit) proceed to murder. And the ‘jack’ in the pulpit isn’t even the flower—they’re hidden in the pulpit at Jack’s feet!
