Sharing in a clonal plant: the data do not fit the well-established theory

What is it about?

Clonal plants can share resources and divide the labour among parts of the clone. The idea was to get some quantitative data on this, but instead, Jana got an evidence that shows we do not understand sharing in clonal plants. If parts of the clone are let to share resources in an heterogeneous environment, they usually perform better than the isolated parts - this has been shown many times. Also, the theory was that the benefit of sharing should be higher when the resource is strongly limited, so that there are some really poor parts, to which getting at least something from the other parts of the clone should help a lot. When we tried to show this, we were surprised with the result: sharing paid off more when everybody was above the minimal level. Moreover, the way how the parts of the clone grew in order do acquire new space strongly differed among connected and non-connected plants, and in response to the amount of the resource. Plants were more eager to forage further when they were connected to the rest of the clone and were small themselves. The disconnected ones did not take the risk.

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Why is it important?

The theory and its model are well established for more than 20 years - but in this case, we prove it all wrong, or at least more complicated than expected.