Isolated plant populations are more vulnerable to disease than highly connected ones, contrary to popular thinking.
Diseases are thought to spread more quickly in dense populations, which facilitate the transfer of disease from one group to another. But Anna-Liisa Laine of the University of Helsinki and her team found a different pattern when they tracked more than 4,000 populations of the weed Plantago lanceolata over 12 years on the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea. Rather than being protected, isolated populations were infected by the mildew Podosphaera plantaginis more often than weeds in dense networks.
The team then studied samples from 22 plant populations in the lab and found that plants from highly connected populations were generally more disease resistant than their counterparts from fragmented populations, possibly because resistance genes are more readily exchanged among populations located near each other.
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Stick together to fight disease. Nature 510, 314–315 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/510314d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/510314d
