Thorny Bush

Even though this photo doesn't look like much, there's a key ecological concept to be demonstrated here. I found this cut down plant outside the Seahawk Landing and although they cut off the tops of the plant, I was thrilled that it had one of the concepts that we talked about in the lecture that day. The plant has thorns to try to defend itself from certain species that try to make it their home. The stems of the bush exemplified constitutive defense, where the features on the organism are not triggered by predator interaction and instead are present on the organism at all times. In a way I think this is better than induced defenses because with induced defenses, the predator has to trigger the defense, but with constitutive defenses, the organism doesn't have to be triggered by a predator. After searching for a long time, it was apparent that without the top of the bush, it was going to be close to impossible to identify the species. However, I came to the conclusion that the closest species was "Caesalpinia decapetala", an ornamental species of bush that use to be popular to decorate gardens.

 

Sources: keyserver.lucidcentral.org/weeds/data/media/Html/caesalpi...

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