A big part of evolution is competition-- when there are limited resources to go around, plants and animals have to duke it out for nutrients, mates, and places to live.
A big part of evolution is competition-- when there are limited resources to go around, plants and animals have to duke it out for nutrients, mates, and places to live. That means that the flower-covered meadows of China’s Hengduan mountains were an evolutionary mystery-- there are dozens of species of closely-related rhododendrons that all live in harmony. To figure out why, scientists spent a summer carefully documenting the flowering patterns of 34 Rhododendron species, and they discovered the reason why the plants were able to coexist: they burst into bloom at different points in the season so they don’t have to compete for pollinators.
“There’s this basic idea in ecology of the niche, that a species’s lifestyle, like what it eats and how it fits into the environment, cannot be replicated in the same community. If two species with the same lifestyle are living in the same space, they’ll compete with each other, so either one or both of them will adapt to have different, non-overlapping lifestyles, or they’ll go extinct,” says Rick Ree, a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago and senior author of the new study in the Journal of Ecology. “Since there are so many closely-related species of rhododendrons all living together in these mountains, we wanted to figure out how they were able to co-exist.”
Rhododendrons are flowering shrubs; you’ve probably seen some species (like azaleas) for sale at the garden center. The Hengduan Mountains, adjacent to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, are what biologists call a biodiversity hotspot: an ecologically fragile place with unusually high numbers of different species. “They form thickets along the sides of the mountains, it looks like an ocean of flowers,” says Qin Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum and the paper’s lead author.
Read more at Field Museum
Photo Credit: Ralphs_Fotos via Pixabay
