Environmental morphing enables informed dispersal of the dandelion diaspore
Abstract
Animal migration is highly sensitised to environmental cues, but plant dispersal is considered largely passive. The common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, bears an intricate haired pappus facilitating flight. The pappus enables the formation of a separated vortex ring during flight; however, the pappus structure is not static but reversibly changes shape by closing in response to moisture. We hypothesised that this leads to changed dispersal properties in response to environmental conditions. Using wind tunnel experiments for flow visualisation, particle image velocimetry, and flight tests we characterised the fluid mechanics effects of the pappus morphing. We also modelled dispersal to understand the impact of pappus morphing on diaspore distribution. Pappus morphing dramatically alters the fluid mechanics of diaspore flight. We found that when the pappus closes in moist conditions, the drag coefficient decreases and thus the falling velocity is greatly increased. Detachment of diaspores from the parent plant also substantially decreases. The change in detachment when the pappus closes increases dispersal distances by reducing diaspore release when wind speeds are low. We propose that moisture-dependent pappus-morphing is a form of informed dispersal allowing rapid responses to changing conditions.
Data availability
The Source data for all figures has been deposited to Zenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7038366
-
Environmental morphing enables informed dispersal of the dandelion diasporeZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7038366.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2016-255)
- Enrico Mastropaolo
- Ignazio Maria Viola
- Naomi Nakayama
Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2019-424)
- Madeleine Seale
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (P011586/1 and T006153/1)
- Michael R Blatt
European Commission (ERC-2020-COG 101001499)
- Ignazio Maria Viola
Royal Society (UF140640 and URF-R-201035)
- Naomi Nakayama
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Dominique C Bergmann, Stanford University, United States
Version history
- Preprint posted: February 7, 2019 (view preprint)
- Received: July 18, 2022
- Accepted: November 28, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: November 29, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: December 28, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Seale et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,743
- views
-
- 200
- downloads
-
- 4
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Physics of Living Systems
The paramount importance of mechanical forces in morphogenesis and embryogenesis is widely recognized, but understanding the mechanism at the cellular and molecular level remains challenging. Because of its simple internal organization, Caenorhabditis elegans is a rewarding system of study. As demonstrated experimentally, after an initial period of steady elongation driven by the actomyosin network, muscle contractions operate a quasi-periodic sequence of bending, rotation, and torsion, that leads to the final fourfold size of the embryos before hatching. How actomyosin and muscles contribute to embryonic elongation is investigated here theoretically. A filamentary elastic model that converts stimuli generated by biochemical signals in the tissue into driving forces, explains embryonic deformation under actin bundles and muscle activity, and dictates mechanisms of late elongation based on the effects of energy conversion and dissipation. We quantify this dynamic transformation by stretches applied to a cylindrical structure that mimics the body shape in finite elasticity, obtaining good agreement and understanding of both wild-type and mutant embryos at all stages.
-
- Physics of Living Systems
While inhomogeneous diffusivity has been identified as a ubiquitous feature of the cellular interior, its implications for particle mobility and concentration at different length scales remain largely unexplored. In this work, we use agent-based simulations of diffusion to investigate how heterogeneous diffusivity affects the movement and concentration of diffusing particles. We propose that a nonequilibrium mode of membrane-less compartmentalization arising from the convergence of diffusive trajectories into low-diffusive sinks, which we call ‘diffusive lensing,’ is relevant for living systems. Our work highlights the phenomenon of diffusive lensing as a potentially key driver of mesoscale dynamics in the cytoplasm, with possible far-reaching implications for biochemical processes.