#POLLINATORWEEK: The Purpose of Pollinators
Bee doing what it was put on earth to do.
This is Passport to Texas
The act of pollination… is as old… as time.
Pollination occurs when an animal or a natural vector, like wind, moves pollen from one plant to another.
Plant diversity supports native wildlife and us. Texas Parks and Wildlife invertebrate biologist Ben Hutchins says 80% of native plants and about one-third of agricultural crops depend on pollinators.
Lots of insects pollinate. There are beetles that pollinate. There are flies that pollinate. But what we most often associate with pollination are butterflies and particularly bees.
Texas has about a thousand species of native bees, but like their cousins the European honeybee, their populations are in decline. And without our pollinators…
It’s not an exaggeration to say our landscape would be unrecognizable without pollinators. And even more drastically, all of our native animals that depend on those plants for food, for shelter…those animals couldn’t survive, because 80% of our plants wouldn’t survive.
Tomorrow, what we can do in urban and rural areas to help support pollinator populations. That’s tomorrow.
The Wildlife Restoration program supports our series.
That’s our show for today…For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti
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