The University of Utah’s press officer Lee Siegel – never one to insist on decorum if a whoopie cushion is at hand – put out a press release last weekend with the title: Living Fossils Have Hot Sex (see Grist below). It’s about plants called Cycads. They haven’t changed much, outwardly, for 300 million years. The news, from a report in Science Mag: they alternately heat and then let cool their cones to turn up and down intense, heat-activated odors. The result is to alternately repel and draw thrips, orchestrating efficient pollination as the insects troop in appropriate sequence to and from male and female plant parts. In addition to the grabber headline, Siegel further down says the sex is smelly, too.

So let’s pass the time by breaking the resulting smatter of stories down by headline, according to those following Siegel’s lead in appealing to the steamy imaginations of readers, and those whose cooler heads opted to be a tad more genteel:

HOT SEX HEDS:

Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen: Primitive plants have hot, stinky sex;

ABC (Australia) Stephen Pincock: Plants enjoy hot, smelly sex in the tropics;

AFP : Living fossils have hot sex: study.

New Scientist – Catherine Brahic: Ancient plant has hot, stinky sex;

G-Rated Heds:

ScienceNOW – Elizabeth Pennisi: Leading Pollinators by the Nose (pretty vague, but with a nice lede on perfumes and driving men wild);

National Geographic – Sara Goudarzi: Cycad Plants “Woo” Insects With Heat, Odor; (Tamer, same point).
AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Cycads Plants use scent to lure insects (which hardly distinguishes them from many other plants).

LiveScience – Andrea Thompson: Primitive Plants Trade Food for Sex ; (Who doesn’t?)

You decide which approach serves readers the best. Methinks Lee made the right call. But The Tracker’s attention is more piqued by the “living fossil” business. A corollary is suggestion that cycads represent an intermediate evolutionary step toward the way that more recently-arrived flowering plant families use odor to enhance pollination. The question: just because selection has kept cycads looking about the same surely doesn’t mean their genomes haven’t been drifting, evolving, refining their niches via selection, etc. Why assume the ancient ones had (ok, here goes) hot, stinky sex too? Do ALL extant cycads do it? Maybe it came along in the Triassic or whenever. Does “living fossil” mean anything other than looks sort of the same now as then, anyway?

Grist for the Mill: Univ. of Utah Press Release;

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