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Image of the day – 148
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Here are two flowering plants with colours on opposite sides of the colour wheel. They’re very distant relatives; the yellow Narcissus (daffodil) is a monocot, the purply-blue Streptocarpus is a dicot. You can’t get much further apart in the family tree of flowering plants, but they look well together.
These two plants simply could not survive in one another’s home territory. The Narcissus needs plenty of moisture, produces leaves in late winter, is not troubled by frost, and flowers in the springtime. It also appreciates some bright sunshine.. Streptocarpus cannot take any degree of frost at all, and is touchy about water. Not enough and it will wilt and die, too much and… wait for it… It will wilt and die! It likes the soil to dry out completely and then have a real drenching, but do not water it again until the soil is really dry. It likes shade or partial shade, but not full sunshine.
Adaptation
The fact that these two plants like such different conditions is nothing to do with the fact they are very distant relatives. All plants growing in the wild are well adapted to the soil type, climate, other plants and animals of the places they inhabit. Natural selection over many, many generations will ensure that this is so. It’s only the survivors that will have a chance to produce seeds. By definition, the next generation comes only from the plants that survived the current generation. Survivors thrive; the rest die out.
Climate change
And this in turn is one of the challenges life faces in the changing climate we are creating. The climate has changed dramatically in the past, but it has always happened slowly, usually taking tens of thousands of years to shift from ice age to interglacial, or from desert to semi-desert to grassland to forest. A species may seem to move north or south, east or west, remaining in the climate zone that suits it best. But what is actually happening is that as a climate zone shifts geographically, conditions become less suitable in one area and more hospitable in another. Perhaps the species manages to survive a little further north than before but struggles and dies on the southern edge of its old range.
This process takes time, but the global warming trends we see due to greenhouse gas releases are many times faster than any natural climate change. Populations cannot respond fast enough under such circumstances; they go into decline and die out – the species may then become extinct, gone forever.
See also:
- Climate change and biodiversity – Royal Society
- Climate change in 60 seconds – Royal Society
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