Known as the world’s smelliest fruit, durians are also essential to the farming economy of Indonesia. Although repulsive to many Western noses — some compare the smell to rotting trash — durians command the highest unit price of any fruit in Indonesia, with an export value of more than $250 million in 2013.

Hoping to help improve the yield of small-scale farmers, three researchers decided to figure out what kind of creatures pollinate the durians in Sulawesi, a large island at the center of Indonesia.

In a three-step process, the team first tested the plants to figure out what time of day pollination usually occurred. Evenings, they discovered, were prime time, as each flower opens for a single night and produces pollen only that one night.

Then the researchers put bags on some of the flowers. Some bags had holes big enough for bugs but not larger creatures, and some had no holes at all. The bagged plants did not yield fruit, suggesting that something bigger than a bug was responsible for pollination.