Moraea albicuspa flower

The flower of Moraea albicuspa has three large outer tepals, obovate in shape and spreading, usually with pointed tips. The three in picture sag and are obscured or eaten in the photo. The specific name, albicuspa, means tipped with white points. The erect inner three tepals of the flower in picture contrast with the big outer ones. They are much smaller, split into two narrow lobes that taper gradually to acutely pointed tips. The photo was taken in January in the Drakensberg.

Narrowly triangular yellow patches or nectar guides, covered in scattered brown spots like leopard skin, are present at the outer tepal bases. They serve to attract pollinator attention. The inner three tepals in picture also have spots on their insides but in black and white, no yellow.

Pollinator body parts as well as flower parts have been shaped and coloured over countless generations in evolutionary adaptation for allowing their owners to fulfil food for pollination contracts. These slow to appear, long term modifications ensure the provision of viable parts for pollinator feeding and plant reproduction respectively. Evolution is the gradual change in all living species that results from timing the death of most specimens either before or after they reproduce, depending on their suitability for contributing to or sustaining the species in the environmental conditions in which it finds itself.

Nectar guides or floral guides on corollas are not always yellow. In fact, they are not always visible to humans, as some are only visible in ultraviolet light. Some insects, such as bees, can see a colour called bee violet. Bee memory of this colour serves to attract them to the food. At the other end of the light spectrum, the components of white light in the rainbow, bees are unable to see red, the wavelengths for which their vision is adapted being shorter than in the case of humans that can see red. Bees can see light in the wavelength range from about 300 nanometers to 650 nanometers, making up in ultraviolet what they lose in red.

Pollinators eat better from having colour guides while they pollinate unwittingly, fulfilling their interspecies commitments. This mutually beneficial arrangement requires no contract or study, having evolved from the systematic timing of numerous ancestral deaths in the participating insects and plants. The contract of give and take between two or more species is secured by enticement only, sustained by mutual benefit, thus no paperwork. That is but one of the features that render nature miraculous, yet understandable.

The system remains intact as long as sufficient viable seeds are produced that will one day feed new generations of the insects, birds, rodents and whatevers of the neighbourhood. The system changes when conditions, such as climate or habitat require another modification in flower or insect (or both) to keep pace with environmental challenges. In this way nature extends the art of the possible by adding new ways for insects get fed while pollinating flowers to set seed. All this artful stuff comes about from the relentless natural imperative driven in every species : to have children that can have children.

A continual range of random alternatives is being produced genetically in all living species all the time, even when everything works. These are the genetically determined individual differences in the offspring of a species. This is what makes us recognise friends and relatives. Individual differences keep possibilities of becoming open, because who knows how the environmental challenges may change in the future, or what will be the opportune individual trait for sustaining the species through a quirk of the always unknown future.

Redundant alternatives fall by the wayside, meaning unsuitable specimens die young or mostly do. Unsuitable here means incapable of coping, thus dying soon. The clearly unworkable ones die out the fastest, the marginal ones define the grey area of the process. This continual sacrifice happens within every living species, the unhelpful therefore incapable ones dropped through early death. The ones that have what it takes, whatever may be needed, are allowed to live a little longer, long enough to breed, given the lifecycle of the particular species. And so do all species change as the survivor characteristics shift to the viable functionalities of the time and the place, whenever and wherever a specimens happens to live. Sudden serendipitous new routes are found in genetic luck and freak, appropriate in the prevailing circumstances of the arriving day. This make history.

Species survival, which is equal to success in making babies that can cope in the prevailing circumstances, is ensured by adaptation, i.e. selection within the species. The full record of patterns in early and late mortality in every species is its true history, too huge to be kept or checked, but statistics generate the summaries in various ways for humans to understand increasingly how it al works. All die, of course, some already before reproduction, the rest after. The survivors until sex and childbirth determine the characteristics of offspring and therefore of the continued species. The non-reproducing ones miss out on leaving a legacy of their genes continuing in the next generation, contribute by completing the specific picture.

No ethics are involved in nature apart from among humans. Blame this peculiarity of self-inflicted societal interaction standards on the human brain. The species invented right and wrong and therefore have to live with its consequences. Fighting for mating rights in most species influence the genetic selection processes. Right and wrong don't enter there apart from among people. Natural processes such as these are summarised in statistics allowing for error variance as found in all living species data. Strict adherence to precise formulae as in some algebra doesn't happen here. 

This may also bring about bimodal distributions of two successful types evolving from one original species. The splits may be more than two-ways, i.e. more, multimodal distributions may come about. Such splitting of multiple survival groupings result in forms, varieties, subspecies or fully separated new species. Biodiversity increases from multiplying of winning ways. Mass extinctions are setbacks, the survivors inexorably plod on in filling the world with more that don't even know it. Survival over challenges come in many forms multiplied by time and opportunity. In humanity the byproduct of racism stems from this.

Evolutionary events may appear to display miraculous synchronicity: such incredible cleverness can only come about through masterminding infinite detail! The sheer volume of random options created in nature is, however, a continuous stream of natural processes following natural laws, not planned action. The contingencies that follow are endless, appearing ruthless. Only a minute proportion of all the possibilities come to fruition, sometimes suggesting astonishing coincidence.

The volume of nature's enormous numbers of discarded alternatives, the early deaths, is invisible to the beholder of the living plants and animals, the ones that made it at a particular time and place. This masking of the masses of deaths among unfit plants and animals feeds the sense of wonder at the miracle of life. This miracle is still and forever continuing as long as anything lives. Natural selection meaning survival until the setting of viable seed by only those specimens having suitable attributes for meeting all the important environmental challenges, is a refined selection criterion, continually changing in its nature and content. It defines the evolving nature of a species in terms of the timing of death of all its members.

Understanding how it all works has been and is still studied. Part of it is self-knowledge, because as a species we're included. The knowledge grows incrementally, driven by curiosity about the environment and untold ecological details. This happens whether things are hotting up, freezing over, hit by social unrest, war, crime, meteorites or atom bombs. Some of all that particularly concerns people. But every species has something special waiting around the corner that may double or discontinue it. Complex outcomes, countless life processes, mutual interaction among species, climate changes, finite planets, distances measured in billions of lightyears and more, plus the unknown, confront the contenders among winning species on earth and everywhere. The future is ours, yours, somebody else's, forever, or until...

People will never be agreed about the small or big things impacting on our world. Forces in society will allow for some problems to be solved, never all. The living circumstances of our time would have been an astonishing surprise to our ancestors ten generations ago. And so it will be for our children ten generations hence (Pooley, 1998; iNaturalist; Wikipedia; www.pacificbulbsociety.org).