What: Weed species have a wide wide variety of adaptations that make them well suited to being so vehemently hated by farmers, gardeners, and lawn enthusiasts the world over. I find weeds particularly fascinating because of their resilience. In this series of posts, I’ll focus on different adaptations that weed species have. This first post emphasizes adaptations of seeds. I’ll follow up with posts on adaptations of roots, growth patterns, chemical defenses, anthocyanins, ###. Click on the “weed” label at the end of this post to see all of the posts in the series.
Seeds: Weeds rely on spreading their seeds far and wide. The ecological conditions required for weeds to proliferate are destructive distrubances. These can be caused by people (salting roads, mowing lawns, paving surfaces, dirt roads, train tracks, etc.) or they can be repeated natural events (e.g. seasonal floods, over grazing, etc.). Because the plant doesn’t know whether or not the distubance will repeat itself the following year, the plant must put as much energy into . Plants that inhabitat riparian corridors flower in their first year. Plants that invade drier sites often have biennial life cycles.
a weed’s seeds need to carry the plants genes far and wide in search of a
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