Botany student Nick Dowie collecting samples in summer 2011 |
This plant, which depends on a symbiotic fungus to provide its carbon and energy (i.e. mycoheterotrophic), is rare and endangered in New England but is thriving in the west. In the east, P. andromedea is solely associated with eastern white pine, but in the west it is associated with many autotrophic tree hosts such as lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir.
The working hypotheses on the decline of
Pterospora in the east is that either its disjunct distribution has resulted in
a dangerous lack of genetic diversity in a changing environment or that the
fungus with which it is associated is genetically depauperate, resulting in an
an inefficient symbiosis that cannot sustain the relationship.
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