Jake Urso
Author: Heidi Ledford
Publish: January 23, 2014
Source
Summary:
This article talks about how having plant killing fungi in a rainforest helps diversify the plants in that area. A group of scientists sprayed a plot of land in the rainforest with fungicide and left another plot untouched. The plot sprayed with fungicide had a 16% reduction in species richness. Although the fungi are killing plants they are specialized to kill more common and dominant species which give the less common species a chance to flourish. As Keith Clay, an ecologist, said its "A mechanism for maintaining diversity".
Connection:
This unit connects to our units on both plants and fungi, and also ties back into our unit on natural selection. In our unit on fungi we learned about the diets of fungi and also about fungicide which are both mentioned in the article. The connection to natural selection is in the specialized fungi because the reason there is more specialized fungi for the more common plants is because they have been selected for due to the huge food supply those organisms have access to.
Would it be possible for there to be a negative effect of adding the fungacide to gain diversity? For example, if there is too much fungacide and it killed too much of the dominant species.
ReplyDeleteYes, if too much is added eventually it would have an affect on the entire ecosystem because many of the dominant animal species are reliant on those dominant plants as a food source and are specialized to eat those plants. Also if an extremely large amount is added the species that were once dominant will become in the minority and vice versa.
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