Science & SciLifeLab Prize Winner Discovered How Plants Use Heat to Entice Beetles
Years ago, Wendy Valencia Montoya touched a flower in the Amazon rainforest, startling at 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 research has shown that it can.
Valencia Montoya decided to focus on cycads, which are heat-producing plants that first appeared in the late Carboniferous period that predate the emergence of dinosaurs. The first time she saw them, she felt like she was traveling back in time. The plants have thick conical bases topped with feathery leaves and their main pollinator is the beetle Rhopalotria furfuracea.
She sequenced the genome of the cardboard cycad (Zamia furfuracea) and found a protein that burned starch to produce heat. In the field, she painted beetles with UV-fluorescent dye and watched them as they flitted from plant to plant. Notably, cycads naturally emanate heat at different times based on their sex. The insects always went to the warmest sex. Their flight patterns confirmed to Valencia Montoya that the plants’ staggered warming served a function: males first heat up to lure beetles to pick up pollen, and then female plants heat up to entice beetles to deposit it.
“These tracking experiments suggested heat acts as a signal, but the next challenge was to isolate heat from other cues, such as scent,” Valencia Montoya writes in her essay.
To do so, she made scent-free 3D cycad cone models. Beetles gravitated towards the warmed cones. Further analyses showed that the beetles’ antennae expressed a variant of a gene already associated with infrared sensing of heat in other animals including mosquitoes and snakes.
“The gene is so old that it’s basically shared by all animals and has taken different functions in different groups. Humans have a copy, but it is not thermo-sensitive,” Valencia Montoya explained. The longevity of this gene and how its variants differ in purpose amongst animals provides insights into how animal-assisted pollination of plants arose in evolution.
A story of heat and color
Because pollination is so nuanced, she also had to account for the role of sight in the cycad-beetle pollination tango. Through reconstructions of beetles’ visual systems, Valencia Montoya determined that the insects do not see cycads — or really anything — as particularly vibrant. The insects have dichromatic vision, unlike bees and butterflies, which heavily rely on tri- and tetrachromatic vision to find flowers. Heat, therefore, is more seductive than sight to hungry beetles.
“Beetles thus happened to be around when plants first began advertising for pollination, but their limited color vision offered little advantage to elaborate visual displays, favoring signals like infrared instead,” Valencia Montoya writes in her essay.
When she compared warming plant lineages including cycads with flowering plant ones, she observed older lineages (those with older direct ancestors) were more likely to be heat-makers. Younger lineages, meanwhile, were more colorful. This finding told a story. Later plant species’ radiations, or rapid diversifications, interacted with pollinators that had far more sensitivity to color. And thus, Valencia Montoya writes, “The planet was gradually painted in color.”
“Our winner presented a complete story that was beautifully told. All the way from observing that some ancient plants use heat to attract pollinators to uncovering how cycads produce heat and how beetles detect it. This signaling system may be vulnerable to a warming world, underscoring that disrupting communication between species could impact biodiversity,” said Valda Vinson, executive editor for the Science journals.
Climate warming and sensory pollution
Today, the survival of older warming plant lineages faces threats from climate change. Cycads, in particular, are particularly endangered, and that means their beetles are too. This is because as average temperatures continue to increase, cycad heat will stand out less from background heat.
“Climate warming can be basically sensory pollution for pollinators,” Valencia Montoya said. “Because we humans live in our sensory world, we naturally pay more attention to senses that are important for us like vision. It is harder for us to think about the signals that we don’t see but are very salient to other animals.”
She wants to understand the interplay between various senses in pollination even further. Although the beetles might struggle to use heat to figure out where to go, they may be able to fall back on other senses like scent. She also wants to investigate how exactly beetles can even stomach cycads, because the plants are very toxic.
“Pollination is incredibly complex. There are many signals at play beyond heat, including volatiles and humidity, among others. If you want to know how very small animals with a very small brain find their way through this complexity, understanding how these signals all work together is very important,” Valencia Montoya said.
“The Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists recognizes early-career researchers for their groundbreaking research discoveries as well as their ability to explain their impact,” said SciLifeLab Director Jan Ellenberg. “This year’s winners have identified heat as an ancient pollination signal, discovered a new type of immune cell in simple planarian worms, developed novel molecular tools to sense and reprogram gene expression in living cells, and used spatial biology and AI to map how the brain ages, cell by cell. They have also written very engagingly about their exciting findings and why they matter. We are delighted to recognize these outstanding junior researchers during the formative early years of their careers and look forward to following their future progress as recipients of The Science & SciLifeLab Prize.”
The 2026 winners
Chew Chai is a winner in the category Cell and Molecular Biology for her essay “Nature’s cellular nuke: Discovery of an unknown immune cell type and its cytotoxic killing mode.” She is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, having earned an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Kaiyi Jiang is a winner in the category Molecular Medicine for his essay “Building a cell engineering toolbox: Biology diversity and deep learning are harnessed for discovery.” He is a principal investigator at the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute at Princeton University, with an undergraduate degree from Rice University and a Ph.D. from MIT.
Eric Sun is a winner in the category Genomics, Proteomics, And Systems Biology for his essay “New tools for an old problem: How to map, measure, and model the aging brain.” He is currently a principal investigator in the Department of Biological Engineering at the MIT and the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D from Stanford University.
by: Abigail Eisenstadt
