Ah, Dear Reader, you have a dirty mind. I am NOT talking about human sex, a subject with which many of you may already have a passing acquaintance. I’m talking about plant sex. The plants are about to get horny.

Who cares about plant sex? I hear you cry. Plants don’t even move much! What kind of porno can you make out of that?

You care, that’s who. If plants don’t reproduce, when the old ones die the food chain collapses and we’re all toast.

The plant sex problem is not restricted to the declining numbers of honeybees, the so-called “colony collapse disorder” about which you have heard more than enough lately. The problem is much, much worse. All the pollinators are in deep yogurt.

A recent issue of Science Magazine informs us that there have been two major recent studies by scientists crazy enough to spend their lives counting bugs, (a pasttime that most of us outgrew at about the time we stopped shooting spitballs at our elementary school classmates) have obtained two genuinely disturbing results. First the number of pollinators of all kinds is rapidly declining worldwide. Plants get it on by playing kissy face with insects (yuch!), who carry pollen to their eager loins. (Well, not loins exactly. They’re called pistils. Aren’t you glad that I explained that to you?) No pollen, no baby plants. Of course, also no smelly plant diapers crawling with aphids; no screaming shoots waking you up in the middle of the night. But the poor plants would miss the joys of parenthood: no cute kindergarten plays with wilting plantlings muffing their lines and shedding leaves all over the place. Hey maybe this isn’t all bad! No, wait, wait, wait. If they don’t have baby plants, where will we get salad to eat with our steak? Come to think of it, where will the delicious herbivores get anything to eat so they can graduate into steakdom?

You of course are still clinging to the pipe dream that we, as masters of technology and husbandry (that’s farming, you ninny, not taking out the garbage and begging for nookie) will develop domestic hordes of pollinators who will make up the shortfall. Wrong. Another study has demonstrated conclusively that domestic replacements can’t hack it out there in the wild. It turns out that honeybees are not so good in the sack, pardon me, the pistil. If we lose the wild pollinators, pollination will go the way of the dodo.

But this is great!

There are ways to get along without plant kiddies. Some plants live long enough that running out of food becomes a problem for our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, whom none of us are likely to ever meet. Phooey on posterity! What did posterity ever do for me?

We will learn to eat plants with enormous lifespans. Giant redwoods  live up to two thousand years; bristlecone pines live up to five thousand years; Norway spruce live up to ten thousand years. We will apply our genetic engineering talents to allow us to mate with termites, and we’re in Hog Heaven for millenia. There is also a giant seagrass that lives up to two hundred thousand years, reproduces asexually (a positive application of “go screw yourself”), and can also clone without external assistance. Applying the same technology to allow us to cross breed with manatees, urchins, conches and sea turtles, we can keep munching virtually forever.

Yum!