Killer Maples

Aggressive trees?? ABC News reports:

It all began when Colgate biology professor Frank Frey and a former student, Maggie Eldridge, started looking into a peculiarity involving plants that turn red in the fall. The predominant colors of autumn break out when chlorophyll in the leaves breaks down and exposes remaining pigments, which are often yellow or orange.

But it takes a different process to produce red. That isn't a pigment that is left over when everything else is gone. Instead, it's produced in the fall, at the very time when the tree is struggling to cope with the energy demands of a changing and challenging season.

Why, Frey and Eldridge wondered, did the maple go to all that trouble at a time when it needed its metabolic energy for other purposes, like stimulating the growth of its root system?

Here's what they found:

"When scarlet-tinted autumn leaves are dropped in the fall, it appears that anthocyanins (molecules that produce the red color) leach from the leaves into the soil and protect seedlings and saplings from interspecific competition the following spring," Frey says. In other words, no one but maples allowed.

Comments

[Paperclip]

When I read the beginning of this post I thought it was going to be some real life Whomping Willow.
Which, in retrospect, might have been a bit silly.

[gail]

More of a bark-bearing Borgia.

[piratenamedneo]

little fact I learned working for a tree company, the maple is often named for the predominant color of leaves in the fall, a red maple is different than a crimson king