#crownshyness

Im supposed to be reading TRAQ and MUNICIPAL ARBORIST SPECIALIST. for ISA CERTs rn. But Instead I listened to Beechhouse 7 and depression cherry and rabit holed plant physiology. Here me out though, it was a good rabit hole. A real shower thought provoker if you know what I am sayin’

We can talk about Population dynamics in so many ways; motile plants are interesting, and clustering for light competition is interesting too, as well as clustering for annual roots.

Under immense evolutionary pressure certain physiological traits can stack and form critical key elements for certain species survival function.

Today I binged some old physiology literature to introduce far red light, red light, and blue light sensing forces as a dynamically important factor in plants ability to figure out shapes and move accordingly, this is advanced phototropism. We can look at population stand interactions where not just trees of the same species, but trees of variable age, variable size, variable clustering, variable spacing, compete for light over time and eventually close a canopy and can form cracked spacing and even fill in beneficial micro edges with perfect shape adjustments.

This forms the dome and crack puzzle effect we rarely see as Crown Shyness

With this said, I learned some really cool stuff due to the foot notes as I googled the term Plant-Specific Ocelli  after reading the glossary definition; and we need to talk really quickly because their are non predatory(parasitic seeker plants) that can sense other life around them, not by chemotropism, not by twining till you touch something, not by organic depletion or bacterial/ fungal trails, but by vision, and Im not just talking about far red light sensing and moving a leaf a little bit to fill in a puzzle, im talking,  biomimicry of shapes and with no chemical needed. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1360138516300930

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27491517/

Boquila trifoliolata, once thought to be parasitic relative or protoparasitic and evolving under predator prey selective pressure to have a functional ability to match it’s leaves to any plant it grows adjacent too, matches it’s “host” plant as biomimicry to fit in and or fool predators through transposable copying or splicing as a parasitic gene transfer, similar to doddar’s ability to do gene transfer for allelopathic prevention and to trick the host into thinking it’s not being parasitized.

Well...

This idea of how it changes shape turned out to be wrong, infact you can lay it across a bench of random species and over time depending on how dense the different species are and how spread out they are, it will adapt to multiple leaf shapes on the same plant at once. Truly plastic(meaning capable of change) and polymorphic in this respect.

 Not only does it do that without parasitism there was a test on fake plants done to see if it would have a change/ association, not only did it not form any haustoria with the fake plant, it changed it’s leaves so its plasticly polymorphic and capable of sensing shapes to change into them which means it has a form of vision that isn’t a normal light based motor movement form of Plant specific ocelli. From what i’ve red, it’s plastic clustering and it’s reticulate venation under certain shade are meristemally motile, react to light, adjust photo-receptors through movement, and grow and abort to form the leaves new shape which is adjusted in short node -internode- node sections.

So now, I also know that arabidopsis, which is a model annual plant species, has root sense plant specific ocelli, and a number of algae have them too. What I want to know now is are there forms of this in populations of walking fern, if algae have done this what about pnuematophore balast species of plants that have to have their traps at an ideal depth for light and feeding on microorganisms like

Utricularia spp.  which use upper branches as surface area stabilizers more than for food collection.

A great example of crown shyness in a group of trees at the Craggy Gardens Picnic Area in western North Carolina.