When Michaelis and Menten met Holling: towards a mechanistic theory of plant nutrient foraging behaviour.

ABSTRACT: Plants are adept at assessing and responding to nutrients in soil, and generally proliferate roots into nutrient-rich patches. An analogy between this growth response and animal foraging movement is often drawn, but because of differences between plants and animals it has not always been clear how to directly apply existing foraging theory to plants. Here we suggest one way to unite pre-existing ideas in plant nutrient uptake with foraging theory. First, we show that the Michaelis-Menten equation used by botanists and the Holling disc equation used by zoologists are actually just rearrangements of the same functional response. This mathematical unity permits the translation of existing knowledge about the nutrient uptake physiology of plants into the language of foraging behaviour, and as

SUBMITTER: McNickle GG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4271705 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature