The plant in the attached image is a wild type! It have been grown in pots and all growth conditions were in educate levels. Why does the plant still show symptoms of stress!
What is the role of these small white crystals?
Note: The plant with significantly salty taste.
Plants that are growing in desert environment for long time, they are adapted to such environment, so they inherently have stress tolerance mechanisms, but if they were transferred to better environment they need to be acclimatize to it. The level of antioxidant as an example will be less and less after each season of the new conditions. Probably!
Dear Dr. Mohammed..
You are quite right about gradually acclimatization. You may know that the plant has different tools to overcome the stress conditions; heritable, physiological and phenotypical etc. My question still there, dose the plant substitute the inefficient root system with accumulating salts on the outer surface to activate an osmotic pressure for the plant benefit!
That is true Dr Ayoob,
the accumulation will less and less each time they are sown in new environment, beside the quality of the good taste of this plant also will be less, because the salty flavor will be less..
Halophytes tolerate high salt levels but some of them exclude salts from the leaves even in normal nutrition to keep chloroplasts environment at low salinity. There are refs in Ecophyliogy of vascular halophytes by Ungar
I believe adaptive mechanisms are already in place to compensate for plants' inability to avoid extreme environmental changes unlike animals that can avoid based on their motility. Rather, plants usually exhibit tolerance. If adaptive mechanisms were not effectively in place they would easily be wiped out by sudden environmental change and it suggests why plants have therefore been able to outlive animals. If and when mankind succeeds to wipe out his own kind, I am definite that plants will still continue to survive. Talk of Nature (God's) compensatory mechanism but let's not enter into disputed territory.
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