altruistic plants?

It’s dis­ap­point­ing to put together a pot of sev­eral seem­ingly matched plants–even of the same species, only to have most of the plants dwarfed and out-competed by one of their pot-mates. Some­times you want to throw your hands up and quote Rod­ney King, “I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? …I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out!”

A study pub­lished last year by McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity biol­o­gist Susan Dud­ley sheds some light on the phe­nom­e­non. She found that sib­ling plants of the same species coex­ist nicely when grown in the same pot, being gen­er­ally con­sid­er­ate of each other as they pro­duced their root sys­tems. But in con­trast, plants of the same species that were “strangers” to each other pro­duced highly com­pet­i­tive root sys­tems that didn’t show the same level of cooperation.

sea rocket

“Though they lack cog­ni­tion and mem­ory, the study shows plants are capa­ble of com­plex social behav­iours such as altru­ism towards rel­a­tives,” says Dud­ley in the McMas­ter Daily News. “Like humans, the most inter­est­ing behav­iours occur beneath the surface.”

Accord­ing to the report, the study was done with one species, “sea rocket (Cak­ile eden­tula), a mem­ber of the mus­tard fam­ily native to beaches through­out North Amer­ica, includ­ing the Great Lakes,” so its effects might be dif­fer­ent with other species.

But the next time you assem­ble a con­tainer plant­ing it might be inter­est­ing to see if cut­tings of one plant or seedlings from the same clones develop a more coop­er­a­tive liv­ing arrange­ment than wildly dif­fer­ent clones taken from the entire veg­etable dias­pora of the same species.

Image from:USDA-NRCS PLANTS Data­base / Brit­ton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illus­trated flora of the north­ern United States, Canada and the British Pos­ses­sions. Vol. 2: 196.

April 21 2008 06:28 pm | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • •

2 Responses to “altruistic plants?”

  1. Greg on 22 Apr 2008 at 8:49 pm #

    That’s kind of amazing…

  2. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » nepotism and plants on 02 Jun 2009 at 5:24 am #

    […] find­ings sound a lot like another study I’d men­tioned just a lit­tle a year ago, where seedlings from the same par­ents will coex­ist hap­pily in a pot, […]

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