Plants Minimize Water Loss

Biological Strategy

AskNature Team

Coordinate by Self-Organization

To create and maintain a healthy community of individuals and ecosystems requires that living systems coordinate their activities. Coordination doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a leader orchestrating what happens. In nature, coordination is usually achieved through self-organization. In a flock of geese flying in a V-formation, for example, there’s no lead goose controlling where all of the others fly. The flock uses this formation because each goose gains energy from air vortices created by the goose in front of it. The lead goose doesn’t gain that benefit, so when it tires, it moves back and another goose takes the front position.

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Cooperate/Compete Between Different Species

From parasitism to mutualisms, there are endless interactions between organisms in nature. Interactions between species that lead to a negative outcome for one species are known as competition. Cooperation occurs when organisms work together for the benefit of each organism or species. While competition often occurs over resources or mates, the more biologists have begun to look for examples of cooperation in nature, the more they have found. For example, around 90% of plants have a beneficial partnership with fungi. Fungi provide the plant with nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, in exchange for sugars from the plant.

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Regulate Water Storage

Maintaining water onsite is an important function of ecosystems. Ecosystems and the organisms that comprise them depend upon water for chemical processes, and therefore for life. But because water is subject to gravity, keeping it onsite can be a challenge. The solution to this is some sort of water storage, which can occur in soils, on top of the ground, or within tissues of living or dead organisms. For example, some trees play a role in supporting water storage in their ecosystem. Unlike pine trees (which keep their needles year-round, losing water to transpiration and evaporation), oak trees lose their leaves during the fall and winter. This leaf loss allows more rain to run down their branches and trunks and into the soil, where much of it will be available to the trees and other organisms in the spring.

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Flowering Plants

Clade Angiosperms (“receptacle seed”): Dandelions, oaks, grasses, cacti, apples

With 416 families containing some 300,000 known species, angiosperms are the most diverse group of plants, and they can be found around the globe in a wide variety of habitats. They are characterized by seeds that grow enclosed in ovaries, which are enclosed in flowers. The floral organs then develop into fruits of myriad kinds and dimensions, from simple seed casings on maples to elaborate fleshy growths like papayas. The oldest flower known from fossils, Montsechia vidalii, appeared during the Jurassic Period 130 million years ago. They are the primary food source for herbivorous animals, which in turn makes them the indirect food source for carnivores as well.

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Plants in arid ecosystems self-organize to minimize water loss and aid plant and seed survival.

“The vegetation of arid ecosystems displays scale-free, self-organized spatial patterns. Monitoring of such patterns could provide warning signals of the occurrence of sudden shifts towards desert conditions…Scanlon et al. ⁴ (page 209) and Kéfi et al.⁵ (page 213) explore the problem of how vegetation in semi-arid ecosystems is organized in space and time. These studies point the way to how forecasting might be achieved. They involve analyses of the size distribution of vegetated patches in the Kalahari Desert ^4, and in three different areas of the Mediterranean basin ⁵, and they cover different spatial scales and types of vegetation…The authors also identify the origin of the mechanism underlying self-organization: a process of ‘local facilitation’ among plants, set against the background of overall control by water availability. Water is the limiting resource, but short-range interactions among plants involve positive effects that are a necessary condition for power laws to exist. The plants create a local environment that minimizes water run-off and facilitates the survival of other plants and seeds (Fig. 1).” (Solé 2007:151-153)