Whether it’s a fight over who gets to pick the TV station or whose turn it is to sit in the front seat, there’s nothing more relatable than fighting with your siblings over finite resources. It’s so relatable that researchers even see it in flowers; some rhododendrons grow in very specific regions and need to be at just the right elevation to thrive, and oftentimes they end up sharing a habitat with other species of rhododendrons, all packed in together because that’s the area that has everything they need to grow.
But one resource in particular is pretty hard to share: pollinators. There’s only so many pollinators at once, but all the rhododendrons need their help to reproduce, so they’ve managed to compromise by blooming in shifts - one set of flowers blooms earlier and the other waits until later in the season.
See, even flowers can learn to take turns.