Some plants just bloom so rarely even though thats an important part of their lifecycle ( every plant that blooms reproduces like that?).
So for me it seems odd that some plants don‘t try to maximize the number of times they do this.
Dessert cacti make sense to me since they want to try when the conditions are just right and not waste precious energy, but thats not every plant that rarely blooms.
So why do some plants bloom so rarely ?
In: Biology
There are a few schools of thought for plants (and animals really)
Spend your efforts on reproducing once in a while and doing everything you can to ensure the survival of that offspring
or
go balls to the walls and spam out as many kids as you can. They can’t all die, right?
Flowers that bloom rarely have invested heavily in option A above. You will almost certainly find that the bloom coincide with a very specific insect that also adopts the same cycle. That insect is attracted to this plant, so the plant can basically ensure that the pollen in the flower is guaranteed to end up on another member if its species. Whereas a typical meadow flower pollinated by bees just have to go for sheer numbers because those bees are landing on other irrelevant plants too and wasting pollen.
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