"Even people who work on pollination don't usually consider weevils as one of the main pollinators, and people who work on weevils don't usually consider pollination as something relevant to the group," says Bruno de Medeiros, an assistant curator of insects at Chicago's Field Museum and the senior author of the study. "There are lots of important things that people are missing because of preconceptions."

There are about 400,000 species of beetles that scientists have identified, making them the largest group of animals in the world. And the largest group of beetles are the weevils. "There are 60,000 species of weevils that we know about, which is about the same as the number of all vertebrate animals put together," says de Medeiros. The new study is a review of hundreds of previously published descriptions of interactions between weevils and plants, to better understand their role as pollinators.

Weevils are sometimes considered pests; they can sometimes be found in pantries eating pasta and grains, and around the turn of the 20th century, boll weevils disrupted the American South's cotton economy by feeding on cotton buds. However, many species are beneficial to plants, especially as pollinators.