Natures wonders: insects protect plants (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 06, 2023, 18:09 (534 days ago) @ David Turell

Plants offer food and get protected:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/evolution-ants-plants-marjorie-weber-scientists-to-...

"A crack team of arthropod bodyguards may be defending that cherry tree in your backyard or the maple across the street.

"Mites protect plants by acting like herds of grazing sheep, munching the fungi that creep across leaves. And ants patrol branches, ready to bite or sting hungry caterpillars ­— or even elephants. In return for the protection, plants offer food and housing.

"This kind of cooperation has evolved over and over again, says Marjorie Weber, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Plant bodyguards are everywhere, she says, but most people don’t even notice.

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"Since Darwin’s time, scientists studying what drives evolution have focused largely on antagonistic interactions between species, like finches competing for seeds and arms races between predators and prey. Cooperation’s role in evolution hasn’t always been taken seriously, “largely because it was viewed as a more feminine perspective,” Weber says.

"Weber’s lab focuses on how cooperation drives evolution and biodiversity. She spends her time in the field, greenhouse and the lab, documenting interactions between plants and arthropods, as well as using computational techniques to analyze evolutionary patterns.

"Weber may be best known for her work on extrafloral nectaries. These nectar-filled knuckles bulge from leaves and stems on some plants, leaking sugary snacks that entice ants to stick around and fend off attacks. Weber looked at extrafloral nectaries in modern vascular plants and then reconstructed the trait’s evolution across ancient plant species. The trait, she discovered, was a recipe for evolutionary success. Once the sweet structures evolved in a branch of the plant family tree, that branch quickly accumulated more species. That suggests that the opportunity to trade nectar for insect protection actually spurred plants to diversify.

“'That’s not what people expected,” says Judith Bronstein, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Scientists might assume such an adaptation would help a particular plant survive and its population to grow, but they don’t know why the number of plant species would multiply. “Somehow, possessing extrafloral nectaries leads to diversification,” she says. “And that’s a fantastic avenue for future research.'”

Comment: so its not all dog-eat-dog out there. Here we see another form of symbiosis.