Plant pollinators come in all shapes and sizes. There are the stereotypical insects such as butterflies and bees, birds, mammals… and lizards.

Yup, you read that right. They’re not super common, but there are a few species of lizards and geckos who like going against the grain and choose to visit flowers for their daily meal, with about five species being known to act as pollinators. This makes pollination by reptilian visitors an extremely rare and understudied pollination syndrome. Hopefully at some point in the future we will know what the perfect floral bouquet for a lizard looks like!

Tanya Strydom is a PhD student at the Université de Montréal, mostly focusing on how we can use machine learning and artificial intelligence in ecology. Current research interests include (but are not limited to) predicting ecological networks, the role species traits and scale in ecological networks, general computer (and maths) geekiness, and a (seemingly) ever growing list of side projects. Tweets (sometimes related to actual science) can be found @TanyaS_08.