Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Decision-Making Underlying Support-Searching in Pea Plants

Qiuran Wang
* ORCID logo ,
Silvia Guerra
,
Bianca Bonato
,
Valentina Simonetti
ORCID logo ,
Maria Bulgheroni
ORCID logo ,
Umberto Castiello
ORCID logo
Version 1 : Received: 28 February 2023 / Approved: 1 March 2023 / Online: 1 March 2023 (11:04:12 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Wang, Q.; Guerra, S.; Bonato, B.; Simonetti, V.; Bulgheroni, M.; Castiello, U. Decision-Making Underlying Support-Searching in Pea Plants. Plants 2023, 12, 1597. Wang, Q.; Guerra, S.; Bonato, B.; Simonetti, V.; Bulgheroni, M.; Castiello, U. Decision-Making Underlying Support-Searching in Pea Plants. Plants 2023, 12, 1597.

Abstract

Finding a suitable support is a key process in the life history of climbing plants. Climbers that find a suitable support have greater performance and fitness than those that remain prostrate. Numerous studies on climbing plant behavior have elucidated the mechanistic details of support searching and attachment. Far fewer studies have addressed the ecological significance of support-searching behavior and the factors that affect it. Among these, the diameter of supports influences their suitability for twining plants. When support diameter increases beyond some point climbing plants are unable to maintain tensional forces and therefore lose attachment to the trellis. Here we further investigate this issue by putting pea plants in the situation to choose between supports of different diameters while their movement was recorded by means of a three-dimensional motion analysis system. The results indicate that the way climbing plants move can vary depending on whether they are presented with one or two potential supports. Furthermore, when presented with a choice between a thin and a thick support, the plants showed a distinct preference for the former than the latter. The present findings shed further light on how climbers make decisions as far as support search is concerned, and provide evidence that plants adopt one of several alternative plastic responses in a way that optimally corresponds to environmental scenarios.

Keywords

decision-making; plant movement; kinematics; plant behavior

Subject

Social Sciences, Decision Sciences

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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