CONGRESO
LXV CONGRESSO NACIONAL DE BOTÂNICA
BOTÁNICA
XXXIV ERBOT - Encontro Regional de Botânicos MG, BA, ES 18 A 24 DE OUTUBRO DE 2014 - SALVADOR - BAHIA - BRASIL
Latinoamericano de
Botânica na América Latina: conhecimento, interação e difusão
Would lianas and tree hosts be coevolved? A phylogenetic
approach
AUTOR(ES):Felipe Segala Ferreira;Juliano van Melis;Fernando Roberto
Martins;
INSTITUIÇÃO:
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biologia Vegetal
Instituto de Biologia
Universidade Estadual de Campinas. [email protected]
Most parasitic plants feed on their hosts, but the climbing plants just use
the physical structure of their supports, which can suffer reduction of
reproductive rates and life expectancy. Since trees are resources for
climbing plants, the reduction of reproductive rates and life expectancy that
they can impose to trees seems not to be a good advantageous
evolutionary strategy, because it could result in resource loss for the
climbers over time. As the climbing plants have been present on earth for at
least 500 million years, and the trees have not been extinguished over time,
it seems that climbers have achieved a way to deal with the potential
negative effects that they can cause to trees. Therefore, climbing plants
could have coevolved with the tree hosts by circumventing the potential
problems that they can cause to the hosts due to structural parasitism. We
tested the hypothesis that recent associations between lianas and trees
have occurred between coevolved parasites and hosts. We sampled 100
plots of 10 m x 10 m each, randomly distributed in 6.5 ha in a 245-ha
fragment of the Semideciduous Seasonal Forest in southeastern Brazil. We
sampled all lianas with diameter at breast height ≥ 1 cm in trees with
circumference at breast height ≥ 15 cm. We used an algorithm to test the
hypothesis of pairwise coevolution between parasites and their hosts by
taking into account the degree of similarity of the positions that the
parasites and their hosts occupy in their respective phylogenetic trees. We
recorded 2,874 liana stems of 73 species, and 1,353 tree stems of 106
species. There were 727 different pairs of lianas (parasites) and trees
(hosts), but neither the individual coevolution test for all pairs nor the
global test were statistically significant. Our results do not point out to
pairwise co-evolution between lianas and their tree hosts in the
parasite-host context. Then, the coexistence between climbing plants and
tree hosts might have proceeded over time by means of biological
mechanisms
not
related
to
co-evolutionary
pairwise
processes.Palavras-chave: Assembling community, Brazil, Fahrenholtz’s
rule, pairwise co-evolution, tropical forest.