Abstract

By acquiring symbiosis from the mycelium supported by neighboring plants, seedlings become connected to a common mycorrhizal network (CMN). Although the maintenance of a CMN may lead to mutual benefit among the neighboring plants, the benefits may be unequally distributed if the plants differ in their sink strength for the shared resources in the CMN. Hence, seedlings may not obtain any net benefit from a CMN maintained by competitively superior, mature plants. In a controlled greenhouse experiment, we showed that the presence of a mycorrhizal adult plant does not improve the growth of seedlings, although solitary seedlings benefit from mycorrhizae. Seedlings of the perennial, mycorrhizal, subarctic herbs Antennaria dioica, Campanula rotundifolia, Sibbaldia procumbens, and Solidago virgaurea were germinated alone or in the vicinity of an adult established Sibbaldia plant. The seedlings were either left nonmycorrhizal (NM) or were inoculated by spores or by a hyphal network connected to established Sibbald...

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