Opuntia aurea; stamens moved toward stigma    
Note that the stamens are now tightly wrapped around the pistil. You can see this happen. So if plants don’t have muscles, how does this happen? (Answer: there are other ways to move, not involving muscles. Growth itself is a way of moving, as is changing the water content of cells.) If nothing disturbs the stamens, they go back to the relaxed state over a short time. The metallic green bee is an extra that I hired for the shot. (Don’t worry about the effects on agriculture by the decline of the European honeybee. This incredibly invasive species has displaced many many native bee species. Should the honeybee die off, it will be replaced by the surviving bee species, lurking in your gardens.) My speculation about the phenomenon is that when pollinators, like bees, land on the stamens, the pollinators are pushed to the stigma in hopes of releasing some foreign pollen to the stigma. The species is not self-fertile, so the stamen movement can’t be encouraging self-pollination.   (36/40)   

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