Plants Can Recognise Themselves
Experiments show that a sagebrush plant can recognise a genetically identical cutting growing nearby. What’s more, the two clones communicate and cooperate with one another, to avoid being eaten by herbivores. The findings, published in Ecology Letters, raise the tantalising possibility that plants, just like animals, often prefer to help their relatives over unrelated individuals….
They took cuttings of Artemisia tridentata, a species of sagebrush that does not normally reproduce by cloning itself. They placed each cutting either near its genetic parent, essentially its clone, or near an unrelated sagebrush, and let the plants grow in the wild in the University of California Sagehen Creek Natural Reserve. The researchers clipped each clone they planted, feigning damage that might be caused by natural herbivores such as grasshoppers.
After one year, they found that plants growing alongside their damaged clones suffered 42% less herbivore damage than those growing alongside damaged plants that were unrelated. Somehow, the clipped plants appeared to be warning their genetically identical neighbours that an attack was imminent, and the neighbour should somehow try to protect itself. But clipped plants didn’t warn unrelated neighbours…. (more @ BBC Earth News)
