Lobivia ferox    7/9/21
This plant flowered profusely in May along with the other couple of dozen plants of this species that I have. And now, it's having another flower. This is some sort of experiment. All acts of life are an experiment. Logically, this is a dumb thing for this plant to do. It's wasting a huge amount of energy and water making this flower when there is no other flower present with which to make seeds. Of course, in habitat, there might be thousands of plants within a bee's flying range, and there might be another plant trying the same experiment in this range. It takes at least one bee to find both flowers, and both flowers must be in proper condition for sex. Offhand, I think that the chances for success in all this are vanishingly small. It's much more rational to flower along with the mass of all the other plants of the proper species at the proper time, a classic Gaussian distribution. But Nature likes its experiments. Nature explores the asymptotes of the distribution. All acts of life, that is, every fusion of pollen and egg in an ovary that makes a viable seed is an experiment. The vast majority of these experiments, done by that massive bloom that happens every year, fail. Few seeds become mature reproducing plants. But Nature keeps on running the experiments, to infinity. Nature is always trying to make more life, no matter the cost.   (011/112)   

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