Tag / plants

by Roslyn

A microscopic predator-prey chase

In terms of behaviour, animals have plants beat – though some would argue that plants have their own brand of intelligence.

Not all photosynthesizing beasts are firmly planted, though, and many that live in the water can move. Aquatic algae, for instance, often have whip-like structures (called cilia and flagella) that they can use to propel themselves along in the water. Some land plants also produce flagellated sperm that can move on their own volition.

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A single-celled marine algae with flagella for getting around. From Wikimedia.

In the ocean, the ability to move can be beneficial, allowing algal cells to find food or move to a suitable environment. Motile cells can also avoid their predators by swimming away – something land plants definitely cannot do. Swimming algae incredibly slow, topping out at about half a centimetre per minute – but a new study suggests that the slow race between algae and their predators might be responsible for a far bigger, more dangerous phenomenon.

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by Roslyn

To save trees, major rethink is needed

When you stop to think about it, few things are weirder than a tree. Like us, they’re largish organisms made up of many cells, each with a central nucleus – but we have little else in common. Plants diverged from our early ancestors well before there was anything bigger than a single cell around. They split from the animal lineage even before fungi, which leads to a shocking conclusion. That spot of mould in the vegetable drawer? It’s more closely related to you than the plants upon which you both depend.

Small wonder, then, that plants don’t live and die by the same rules as animals – but this could have dire implications. That’s the message of a new study by Jonathan Davies of McGill University, published in PLoS Biology. Davies and his international collaborators have shown that the factors causing extinction in plants are entirely unexpected, and the upshot is that the current IUCN Red List criteria for listing endangered species – which are based on animal studies – might be useless when it comes to plants.

Davies and his team used the latest the comprehensive Red List data for all flowering plant species in two locations: the United Kingdom and the South African Cape. The Cape is a biodiversity hotspot with thousands of endemic species: plants that evolved there, and that can be found nowhere else. The UK flora, in contrast, is made up of species from other regions that moved in after the retreat of Pleistocene glaciers.

Previous work has shown that among mammals, we are most likely to lose species with large body sizes and long generation times – giant pandas and elephants are classic examples. But according to the new analysis, plants break the mold. Davies and coauthors found that the kinds of plants most at risk in the UK are different from those at risk of extinction in the Cape, indicating that basic traits like size have nothing to do with it. Using a detailed evolutionary history of the Cape species, the team also found evidence that extinction risk in plants is tightly linked to mode of speciation: the Cape species most at risk tend to be ones from the younger, rapidly-evolving lineages.

This implies that in plants, extinction is pruning the tips of the evolutionary tree. The authors suggest an explanation: unlike animals, new plant species tend to arise from small isolated populations that are at the extremes of a much larger ancestral range. Thus, a new plant starts off with a limited distribution, and because range size is an important criteria for Red List risk, it is also highly vulnerable.

The team’s analysis of anthropogenic factors turned up an additional surprise. For the Cape flora, human-induced habitat changes such as urbanization and agriculture cannot explain extinction risk of local plants. In other words, there is no simple geographic correspondence between human activity and plant decline. As the authors put it, places like the South African Cape might therefore be both “cradles and graveyards of diversity”, regardless of human activities.

This study suggests that a major strategy revision is in order if we want to conserve the world’s plants – a group that we all depend upon for oxygen and energy. More generally, risk criteria for one taxonomic group cannot necessarily be applied to another, since the pathways to rarity may be as foreign as the species themselves.

Further Reading

Davies, J. T. et al. 2011. PLoS Biology: 9(5): e1000620.

by Roslyn

Super indelible flower colours

How do you fire a pollinator?

That was the question in last week’s Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour departmental seminar. The speaker was James Thomson, an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Toronto who specializes in the interactions between plants and their animal pollinators. His research shows that nectar-addled hummingbirds are like corporate ladder climbers. Bees, on the other hand, are always getting canned.

Pollination syndromes have been a major focus of Thomson’s work1. These are not garden ailments. “Syndrome” here refers to a suite of traits that tend to be found together, in this case because they help a plant attract a certain kind of pollinator.

Bird-pollinated flowers tend to be red and tube-shaped, producing lots of nectar but relatively little scent. Birds have sharp vision, and do not depend much on their sense of smell. Honeysuckle is an example of this type of flower – or anything that looks like a hummingbird feeder. Bee-pollinated flowers come in shades of yellow, blue, and purple, because bees cannot see the colour red. Familiar examples are sunflowers, snapdragons and wild pansies. These often have petals modified into special bee landing platforms. Flowers that specialize on birds and bees are common, but there are many other pollination syndromes. If a flower is orange-brown and smells like rot, it probably depends on carrion flies. Mammal-pollinated flowers often smell fruity, like synthetic grape flavouring.

In his talk, James Thomson reviewed a decade’s worth of work on beardtongue flowers from the genus Penstemon2. In 2007, Thomson and his collaborators used genetic analyses to build the evolutionary tree for close to 200 of the species in this group3. When flower traits were mapped on to the Penstemon family tree, interesting patterns were revealed.

First, the bird and bee pollinated species were distributed broadly throughout, implying frequent transitions between these two syndromes in the history of the Penstemon group. Like an evolutionary magnet, pollination by one type of animal or another exerts a strong pull on multiple flower traits in concert. Evolving species are drawn rapidly towards a new form, so you almost never find intermediates.

This lability or changeable nature of floral traits was not much of a surprise, but the Penstemon tree also suggested something incredible. Floral evolution was directional.

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