Decision-Making Underlying Support-Searching in Pea Plants

Abstract

Finding a suitable support is a key process in the life history of climbing plants. Climbers that find a suitable support have greater performance and fitness than those that remain prostrate. Numerous studies on climbing plant behavior have elucidated the mechanistic details of support searching and attachment. Far fewer studies have addressed the ecological significance of support-searching behavior and the factors that affect it. Among these, the diameter of supports influences their suitability for twining plants. When support diameter increases beyond some point climbing plants are unable to maintain tensional forces and therefore lose attachment to the trellis. Here we further investigate this issue by putting pea plants in the situation to choose between supports of different diameters while their movement was recorded by means of a three-dimensional motion analysis system. The results indicate that the way climbing plants move can vary depending on whether they are presented with one or two potential supports. Furthermore, when presented with a choice between a thin and a thick support, the plants showed a distinct preference for the former than the latter. The present findings shed further light on how climbers make decisions as far as support search is concerned, and provide evidence that plants adopt one of several alternative plastic responses in a way that optimally corresponds to environmental scenarios.

Ascent and attachment in pea plants: a matter of iteration

“…The dependent variables speci cally tailored to test our topic based on previous evidence [12][13][14][15][16][17]19,20,41 was: i. Spatial trajectories: this measure allows us to describe circumnutation in both qualitative and quantitative terms. ii.…”

“…Among tendril-bearer plants, pea plants (Pisum sativum L. from now on P. sativum) are the most studied at the genetic, morphological, physiological, and behavioral levels 2,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] . P. sativum plant development consists of different growth stages (e.g., seed germination, leaf development, owering, …) aimed to increase the size and height of the plant's body 2,[4][5][6][7][8]11 .…”

Le piante: vita intelligente dei nostri paesaggi

“…Ma questo movimento non è un semplice meccanismo di causa-effetto, è un movimento dalla natura flessibile e attiva, dotato quindi di un'intenzionalità motoria, ovvero di uno scopo che lo guida al fine di raggiungere un obiettivo. Recenti studi hanno analizzato il movimento di raggiungimento e prensione nelle piante di pisello (Pisum sativum L.) (Guerra et al, 2019;Ceccarini et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2023;Bonato et al, 2023) attraverso l'analisi tridimensionale (3D) del movimento. I risultati hanno dimostrato non solo come le piante siano in grado di pianificare il movimento in modo diverso e dipendente dalle caratteristiche del supporto da afferrare, ma che sono anche in grado di decidere quale supporto afferrare sulla base della miglior convenienza in termini di dispendio energetico (Ceccarini et al, 2020).…”