THE COST OF LEAFING
Understanding the trade-offs involved for plants making leaves promises fresh insights on every scale from the plant to the planet, finds John Whitfield.
Excerpt: One definition of economics is the study choice under the constraint of scarcity, and the narrowrangeofchoicesintheleafeconomics
spectrum provides a vivid illus- tration of the various scarcities that dominate plants’ lives. The fact that all leaves lie fairly close to the axis of the spectrum shows that, despite the vast diversity of foliage produced over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, plants have little room for manoeuvre in
how they build their leaves. “Most textbooks of ecology project the idea that there’s an almost infinite diversity of organisms,” says plant ecologist Philip Grime of the University of Sheffield, UK. “But if you look at the core biology of what organisms do with resources, you find severe constraints and trade-offs.”
Credits: NATURE|Vol 444|30 November 2006
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