hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Plants reward microbial and animal mutualists with carbohydrates to obtain nutrients, defense,
pollination, and dispersal. Under a fixed carbon budget, plants must allocate carbon to their
mutualists at the expense of allocation to growth, reproduction, or storage. Such carbon
trade-offs are indirectly expressed when a plant exhibits reduced growth or fecundity in the
presence of its mutualist. Because carbon regulates the costs of all plant mutualisms, carbon
dynamics are a common platform for integrating these costs in the face of ecological complexity
and context dependence. The ecophysiology of whole-plant carbon allocation could thus
elucidate the ecology and evolution of plant mutualisms. If mutualisms are costly to plants, then
they must be important but frequently underestimated sinks in the terrestrial carbon cycle.
