The pollination mutualisms between plants and animals play a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity, ecosystem services, and agricultural productivity. Nocturnal insects, which typically visit flowers at night, are often overlooked due to their activity during low-light conditions and outside of standard human activity cycles. However, the pollination services provided by these nocturnal insects are of significant scientific and practical value, comparable to those of diurnal pollinators. Despite this, our understanding of nocturnal pollinators remains limited.

Researcher LUO Shixiao, affiliated with the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has extensively investigated the coevolution between plants and their pollinators. In his notable contributions, he identified two novel nocturnal obligate pollination systems: the Schisandraceae–resin midges and leafflowers–leafflower moths (LUO et al., 2010; 2017a, b; 2018). Recent team studies have elucidated species-specific pollination-parasitism dynamics between insects and their respective plant hosts (Chheang et al., 2022). These specialized interactions display variations across populations within the same species, creating a mosaic-like interaction pattern on a geographical scale (HAO et al., 2023; 2024). Acknowledging their significant advancements in the realm of plant-insect co-evolution, the prestigious journal New Phytologist invited LUO Shixiao's team to author a Tansley Insight review article. The resultant paper, titled “New insights into coevolution between plants and their cryptic pollinators,” was published online on February 11, 2025 (DOI: 10.1111/nph.20450). The Tansley Insight series, named after Professor Arthur Tansley, the founder of New Phytologist, features opinion pieces on cutting-edge topics in plant science. This article reviews the interacting patterns, co-adaptations, and coevolution in the two emerging cryptic pollination systems. It highlights the significant values of related research for agriculture and medicine, and provides new insights for studying the coevolution between plants and pollinators.

Dr. HAO Kai, the Assistant Researcher from South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the first author of the paper. Researcher LUO Shixiao, the head of the research group, is the corresponding author. This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation (32270242, 31970251, 31170217, 32300196).

Article Link: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.20450

Figure 1. The flower, fruit, pollinating midges and cultivated populations of Schisandraceae species.

Figure 2. The interaction, coadaptation, co-phylogeny, mutualism origin and coevolution between partners, and the future research directions in these two obligate pollination systems: Schisandraceae-resin midge and leafflower-leafflower moth mutualisms.