Scientist Who Found How Plants Use Heat to Attract Beetles Wins Prize

Years ago, Wendy Valencia Montoya touched a flower in the Amazon rainforest, startling in its warmth. Back then, researchers thought that heat-producing plants mainly wielded heat as a way to volatize scents that tempt pollinators. "I decided to challenge this view and ask a more radical question: can heat itself act as a signal to guide pollinators," writes Valencia Montoya, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows in her 2026 Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists grand prize-winning essay. Her piece explains how heat itself is a pollinator beacon with ancient origins. She focused on cardboard cycads, which are heat-producing plants. Their primary pollinator is the beetle Rhopalotria furfuracea. Through genomic sequencing, field observations, 3D models, and more, Valencia Montoya was able to disentangle the role of heat from other pollination cues including scent and sight. In the research process, her work revealed insights on how the world became covered in color. Her award-winning essay also reflects on the endangered status of cycads. As average temperature continues to rise, cycad heat will stand out less from background heat, making it harder for beetles to find and pollinate them. In an interview with the SciPak team, Valencia Montoya described this phenomenon as "sensory pollution." She hopes her findings will inspire scientists to look more closely at the many ways in which plants communicate with their pollinators. Doing so could provide vital insights about how environments and species' relationships will change under climate change.