During the day Million Years of Natural selection, these plants have developed ways to communicate With animals through their fruits and saying something like “Eat me.” The shape, size, color and taste of these fruits has evolved to coincide with the sensory or physical skills of every animal. An evolution that guarantees the survival of its plant as kind.
The Half of well -known plant species with seeds require mutual interaction With an animal that is the scattered means of its seeds and ensures the survival of the species and the possible multiplication in different areas.
Plants and animals
In nature, not all individuals of the same species are the same: they differ in their characteristics, behavior, interactions, diet, etc. A scientific team of the Doñana – CSIC and the University of Sevilla have just published a study in the PNAS magazine in which the plant Individuals of different populations structure their interactions with the animals that feed on their fruits. The results observed in the interactions between individuals are comparable to those obtained between species, which suggests that some are Patterns consisting of the way in which ecological interactions are organized in nature.
Weld plant fleshy fruit interacts with many animals that Consume their fruits and spread their seeds, an important process for forest regeneration. That is why economical animals are considered the ‘forest gardens’. In nature, a multitude of species of plant And animals, or rather, individuals who form their populations, establish each other and connect through mutualistic relationships, generating high complexity networks.
The differences that exist between individuals of the same species are known as intra -specific variation. Studies that analyze this type of variation usually approaches niche theory, which studies Set of resources that use a species and what part of these agents used by their individuals. These drugs can be trophic, such as prey or other types of food, or services that are supplied by other species, such as flower -pollination or sperm Dispersion.
In this freshly published work, the scientific team combined the nicheth theory in addition to the complex network theory for Study how individual plants in different populations determine their interactions with fuel -efficient animals that consume their fruit. To do this, they collected ecological networks based on plant Individual and the community of fuel -efficient animals of 44 populations spread in South America, Asia and Europe, with 29 different species of plants.
Economical animals promote diversity
“Our results show that, comparable to diet studies centered on animals, on average An individual factory receives 70% of the diversity of existing economy in the community, What indicates a degree of considerable generalization, “explains Elena Quintero, researcher and first author of the study.
However, the scientific team proved the existence of a high variation in the pattern of interactions between the different individuals of a population. So within the same populationindividuals who acted as generalists could be found who have many types of interactionAnd others who behaved as specialists is limited to interaction with one or a few species.
In addition, the team calculated with the aim of identifying general patterns in the various populations, different network indexes to investigate how plant Individuals establish their interactions with the community of economical. “We see that in most populations of plants, regardless of the species or ecosystem in which they areOnly a very small percentage of individuals plays a key role in the interactions network, “says Pedro Jordano, research professor at the Doñana – CSIC Biological Station.
Is plant Individuals, whom they call “keystone”, establish several interactions with a high diversity of economical animals and play a central role in the structuring of the interactions within his population and possibly in the dynamics of forest regeneration dynamics. They probably have distinctive characteristics, such as a high production of fruit or strategic locations, making them reliable resources for numerous economical, “explains Elena Quintero.
This scientific work shows how to study nature at the level of individuals, enables us to better understand how interactions within ecosystems are organized. Shows how mutualistic interactions are structured in the same way, both at species level and level of individual and in different ecosystems and beams on the planet, which reveal underlying patterns and consisting of the allocation of roles in nature.
It is More detailed approach not only reveals hidden patterns in ecological communitiesBut also extend the nicheth theory to complex networks such as those that represent the very high diversity mutualisms that take place between plant And animals.