An ability to tell family from strangers is well known in animals, allowing them to cooperate and share resources, but plants may possess similar social skills, scientists believe. Susan Dudley and Amanda File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, report they have demonstrated for the first time that plants can recognize their kin.
This suggests that plants, though lacking cognition and memory, are capable of complex social interactions.
"Plants have this kind of hidden but complicated social life," Dudley said.
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"We hypothesized that plants have evolved to emit a secondary signal to help nearby relatives by promoting the recruitment of natural enemies [of the pest insects]," wrote Yutaka Kobayashi and Norio Yamamura in the latest issue of the journal Evolutionary Ecology.
Plants are also known to be able to identify close relatives to guard against inbreeding, Dudley, the Canadian scientist, added.
"They have self-incompatibility mechanisms where they recognize pollen," she said. "This stops them from being fertilized by their own pollen or by a plant that shares its genes."
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