Researchers who studied these plants found they had a market-based system for dealing with fungi.
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Best Places to See Spring Flowers: Photos
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Spring is almost upon us, and that means an opportunity to see flowering plants turn into a sea of color. From manicured gardens to fields full of wildflowers, here are some spots around the globe for admiring the blooms. Above, the Sonora Desert, which covers parts of Arizona and California, is home to more than 2,000 planet species, from cactus to various wildflowers. Plant These Flowers To Power Bees: Photos
Bureau of Land Management, via Wikimedia Commons
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Keukenhof, located in the Netherlands, is known as "The Garden of Europe." It's one of the world's largest flower gardens, and approximately 7 million bulbs are planted there annually.
Luu, via Wikimedia Commons
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Daffodil Way in Dymock, Gloucestershire in the UK, is a popular hiking route because of the flowers along it. Animals And Bugs That Look Like Flowers: Photos
Trevor Rickard, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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The city of Borujerd in western Iran is known mostly for its historic architecture. But it also has beautiful fields of flowers.
Arman7, CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
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In the spring, Washington D.C. has become the place to admire cherry blossoms. The first trees were imported from Japan in the early 1900s. A few of the originals still remain. Spring Flowers On Display: Photos
Wendy Harman,CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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This field of wildflowers is from the hills of the Canton of Graubünden in Switzerland.
Adrian Michael, GFDL or CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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This photo depicts the canola fields in Luoping County in the province of Yunnan in far southwestern China. The plant that produces the ingredient for cooking oil and margarine also has brilliant yellow flowers.
Fanghong, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Namaqualand, an arid region that spans South Africa and Namibia, is a place to see multicolored fields of daisies and other wildflowers. The Southern Hemisphere's spring occurs during the fall in the United States. Mythical First Flower Found
Cruithne9, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The idea of plants having a sense of fair play might seem a little odd.
But University of Zurich researchers have found that plants seem to have rules that govern their relationship with mycorrhizal fungi which attach to their to root systems and obtain carbohydrates to feed themselves, while supplying the plants with phosphates, a type of chemical that contains the nutrient phosphorus.
In a studypublished in Ecology Letters, the scientists report that plants actually use those varying rewards to compel fungi to compete against one another. The plants reward fungi that provide plants with a bigger amount of phosphates, and penalize “meaner” ones that are more stingy.
“The plant can deliberately decide to provide the meaner partner with fewer carbohydrates,” in an effort to force it to provide the phosphates that the plant needs, ecologists Pascal Niklaus and Bernhard Schmid explained in a press release.
Another of the co-authors, Andres Wiemken from the University of Basel, said that a plant will exploit the competition between two fungi, “triggering what is essentially a market-based process determined by cost and performance.”
But both the plant and the fungi need each other. Mycorrhizal fungi aren’t able to feed themselves, so the organisms use filament structures called hyphae to penetrate the plant’s root system, and suck up carbohydrates provided by the plant. But the plant also benefits from this arrangement, because the fungi provide phosphates and other nutrients — natural fertilizers that are important for plant growth.
The discovery that plants have a decision-making process based upon behavior of other players is important, the researchers say, because it provides a natural system that could be used by economists to study and test market-based theories.
“Because plants make their decisions based on physiological processes and are not distracted from the best course of action by subjective thought, they could even be better models than animals and people,” Schmid explained.