Basic rules for clonal plants spread

What is it about?

How far should the most common plants - the clonal ones - spread? Not too close, because that would induce competition among parts of the same individual, and not too far, since the "pipe" that connects the parts would be too costly. Simple idea that generates non-trivial and testable predictions about life-histories of clonal plants.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Most of the plants are clonal - this gives them an opportunity to place the offspring non-randomly, and people spent a lot of work in describing and predicting strategies of this behaviour. In this paper, we give a cue how to distinguish real strategies and simple results of growth and self-competition in resource-rich environments. Moreover, we show that there are limits of most iconic types of clonality to occur.