New Species of 'Gender-Bending' Wild Eggplant Discovered in Australia

There are some odd species within the plant world, and researchers have recently discovered a new one. One scientist has uncovered a species of wild eggplant found in Australia's Lost City that bends it gender; females actually pretend to be male by producing pollen.

The new species is called Solanum cowiei. The plant was actually first found in 2009 when Chris Martine, Bucknell University biology professor, stumbled upon it during the course of his research. While DNA tests confirmed that the plant was an unknown species, though, Martine lacked the flowers that he needed to assign it a scientific name at that point. Determined to properly identify the species, he returned to Australia last May, hoping to find the eggplants in bloom. Fortunately for him, he found budding flowers.

"If I was capable of doing backflips, I would have done them," said Martine in a news release. "The only issue was that this was supposed to be our last day in the field and not a single bud had opened. We extended our time in the bush and camped out for two more nights, but they never opened."

While the flowers didn't open in the field, though, Martine found some other specimens at the Northern Territory Herbarium. There, he discovered opened flowers, which meant that he could complete his description of the new species. What was more interesting, though, were the flowers themselves. It seemed as if functionally female eggplant plants had morphologically hermaphrodite flowers. In other words, female flowers produced pollen.

"What they're really doing is duping bees into visiting their flowers," said Martine in a news release. "One of the things we're going to do next is study what that means. Do the bees actually get anything from this fake pollen? And if they don't that means the plants are actually tricking the bees into doing their bidding, which would be a really need thing for a plant to do."

The findings are published in the journal PhytoKeys.