What are the survival skills of plants?

Question

we need to elevate our interests towards geography and more about plants.

we want to know more about their skills and physical characteristics, such as some plants have drip tip and waxy leaves, etc.

please enlighten me! :)

thank you and have a nice day!

Answer 1

How Do Plants Defend Themselves?

Upon taking a casual stroll through your local forest, it may or may not have occurred to you that the plants you see around you are stuck where they are - and that this has a great deal of significance. It might not seem like that big a deal to you, but think of it from the plant's perspective. How are you going to defend yourself against various creatures who want to eat you when you can't get away from them? Obviously, you need to come up with a good defence, and that is just what many plants have done.

Over the course of time, plants have evolved several means of defending themselves. The problem is that, along with the plant's evolution, predators* have evolved several means of overcoming the plant's defences. This has put a lot of stress on plants to survive, and natural selection has favoured those that are genetically coded to better withstand the effects of the predators. Most plants today have one or more defences that could include poisons (which occur in a variety of chemically diverse toxins), physical structures, irritants, and bad flavours.

We have highlighted a few of the plants that display these characteristics that you might encounter while walking through a West Coast forest. Next time you take a walk through your own local forest, take the time to look around and see if you can spot any plant defences in action. What do you think a forest ecosystem would look like if plants had no defences? Conversely, how would the forest appear if the defences were too extreme?

*In an ecological context, predation is any interaction between two species in which one is benefited and the other is harmed (Dodson et al. 1998). Here, a predator could be a rabbit, a parasite, etc.