Soil Root Leaf: Dining on Drops
There is more service to nature from these jewel-droplets than we'd realized
If you wander out of a morning and walk down your garden rows, even on a rainless night, many of your vegetable plants and berry bushes will have water droplets glistening at each vein tip.
Moisture is being drawn from wet soil into root hairs, creating a pressure that forces the water out of "water glands" or hydathodes, at the tips of leaves of grasses. I think of this especially for strawberry plants and blueberry bushes. You probably learned in biology class that this is called "guttation."
You wonder how it could have been overlooked until now, but recent work indicates that this is more than a source of water for creatures down near ground level. And this figures prominently in the ecological interaction of plant and animal communities.
“The droplets were also present in blueberry fields through the entire season and their presence doubled the abundance of beneficial insects—parasitic wasps and predators—that protect plants from pests. As a result, droplets might reduce the many problems caused by pests in crops, including invasive pests.
And the researchers suggest that might occur in numerous crops where the droplet phenomenon is common, such as rice, wheat, barley, rye, oats, sorghum, corn, tobacco, tomatoes, strawberries, and cucumbers, among others.” —Futurity
The article in Futurity also makes the point that this source of nutrients is available when nectar is not--as when bloom cycles are out of sync with the peak of nectar-feeding populations of insects or birds
. This is a problem more likely as climate shifts plant and animal timings away from "normal."
And so if I have comments, will I get notification? Just checking, nothing to see here, folks. I would hope that conversations and insight-sharing might happen in comments here, the way they once did on my blog, Fragments from Floyd, starting in 2002.