Plant: Ecology
Rooted as they are in the ground, plants are commonly thought of as leading sedentary, vegetative, passive lives. However, a look at the ingeniously developed interactions that plants have with the other organisms in their ecosystems quickly corrects this notion. Cooperation and Competition Many plant species exist as separate male and female plants, and pollen from male flowers must reach the female flowers in order for pollination and seed development to take place. The agent of pollination is sometimes the wind (a part of the physical environment), but in many cases it is an insect, bat, or bird (members of the biological environment). Plants may also rely on agents for dispersing their seed. Thus, after pollination, cherry trees develop cherries that attract birds, which ingest the fruit and excrete the cherry stones in more distant terrains. Plants have evolved many other mutually beneficial relationships, such as the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that occur in the nodules on t...