2023-08-10 10:35:17
Apples don’t fall far from their trees, they say. But what may be literally true for the weeds in our own garden or other sites of Central European ruderal flora, and literally also in some nuclear families of the A wise manthis does not apply to the tropical rainforest.
This is the conclusion of researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama nun in „Science“ from a survey in the home garden of jungle research: the island of Barro Colorado in a reservoir belonging to the Panama Canal. There, over a period of thirty years, the thriving specimens of several dozen different tree species were recorded in an area of forest the size of a hundred football pitches.
They found that mature jungle trees are, on average, three times further from their parents than would be expected if their location were determined solely by where the parental seeds fall. Sometimes the distance from an individual to that from whose seed it germinated is a hundred yards.
The effect does not make such a habitat any more sparse – in some rainforests you can find more than 250 different tree species on a single hectare. But as for the representatives of each individual species, the trees are clearly practicing social distancing.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 6 Ulf von Rauchhaupt Published/Updated: Recommendations: 23 Ulf von Rauchhaupt Published/Updated: Recommendations: 9
One thing seems to cause the other, as the researchers found out using computer models: Precisely because the density and diversity are so high, the sapling of a different species always gets a chance as soon as trees of the same type germinate too close together and species-specific enemies such as fungi, pathogens or herbivores have an easier time of it. This results in a spatially maximally mixed species distribution. Group formation will not be tolerated.
#Trees #species #practice #social #distancing