Long before bright petals and sweet colors filled the landscape, plants had a different way to get noticed. They used heat. Not warmth you could feel with your hand, but infrared radiation that insects could sense in the dark.
A new study shows that ancient plants used heat as a clear signal for pollination. This discovery changes how scientists think about early plant and insect teamwork. It turns out pollination did not start with color. It started with a glow you cannot see.
Cycads sit at the center of this story. These palm-like plants appeared more than 275 million years ago, long before flowering plants showed up. Scientists often call them living fossils because they have barely changed over time.
For decades, researchers knew cycad cones could heat up. Some cones reached temperatures up to 27 degrees Celsius above the air around them. This heating costs a lot of energy, so it never made sense as a random trait. The big question was why.
Most early guesses focused on smell. The idea was that heat helped spread scent through the air. That sounded reasonable, but it never fully explained the timing or the precision scientists kept seeing.
Beetles Followed the Heat Like a Signal Fire
What they found was far more organized than expected.
The cones followed a strict daily rhythm. Male cones heated up first, then cooled down. Female cones warmed up about three hours later. This pattern repeated with clock-like accuracy.
When the cones reached peak heat, beetles showed up. Not randomly. Right on time. The beetles swarmed the hottest cones, moving from male to female cones as the heat shifted. Pollen moved with them.
To track this, the team used infrared cameras and beetles marked with fluorescent dye. The images showed beetles clustering where the heat was strongest. The cones acted like glowing signs in the dark. To rule out smell, the scientists built fake cones with 3D printers.
These models had heated sand inside but no scent at all. Beetles still flew straight to them.
The final test sealed it. When the fake cones were wrapped in a film that blocked direct heat but let infrared light pass, beetles kept coming. The insects were responding to infrared radiation alone.
The Ancient System Has Modern Consequences
A gene called ‘AOX1’ controls this process.
The energy output during heating rivals that of a hummingbird. That cost tells scientists this signal matters. Evolution does not waste energy without payoff.
Beetles are just as specialized. Tiny heat sensors at the tips of their antennae detect infrared radiation. These sensors use a protein called TRPA1, the same one snakes and mosquitoes rely on to sense warmth.
Each beetle species has its own tuned version of this protein. The temperature range matches its host plant. That kind of match only forms over long periods of co-evolution. This heat-based system likely evolved around 275 million years ago. At the time, insects had weak color vision. Heat stood out in the dark far better than color ever could.
Flowering plants later changed the game. Color offered endless variation. Patterns and hues let plants target many pollinators. Heat alone could not compete. Cycads stuck with a single signal. That choice may explain why only about 300 species remain today, while flowering plants exploded into hundreds of thousands.