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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 13, 2017 0:26:51 GMT -5
I think a big part of whether a tomato or other Solanum will make it over an extended number of years depends on a few factors. one has to do with length. Even when the tomato keeps going, it still goes through the process of losing leaves on the bottom and replacing them on the top, so with each season the length of bare stem between root and leafy part gets longer. Eventually, I think the main line for bringing the food and water back and forth through the stem just gets too long and (if the plant has not been hyper controlled in it's growing) too kinked to work all that well (and those kinks often become structural weak point). In a tomato this can theoretically be gotten around by the fact it can develop roots at each nodule and so go from being a single plant to a group of plants (which I suppose is natural cloning). I suppose that that is ultimately killed mystery plant #1 (which was probably a Solanum) after four or so years; eventually the connecting lines got too long and spindly to work (now that I know what I have and know I have a comparatively stable amount of seed maybe I should try that one again, and this time, not be afraid to pinch it back.). And as I said, it probably favors the indeterminate too. I imagine that fully determinate plants have a sort of built in "death clock", since they eventually stop growing, they eventually are not capable of replacing material that dies off and the whole plant succumbs (anyone ever tried to see what the max life for a determinate tomato is?)
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Post by Al on Jan 15, 2017 3:23:08 GMT -5
The idea of a "death clock" is a bit sad, I imagined the determinate habit is about creating a multi-stemmed plant on which each stem will terminate at a set length. So young new side shoots of fully determinate varieties will potentially be cloneable ad infinitum, but will only grow to their set height. Ancient Yew trees can plant circles of offspring around the main trunk as low hanging branches touch the ground & take root, these appear to be practically immortal. So perhaps there are ancient tangles of self cloning tomatoes out there on the Andean hillsides?
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 15, 2017 9:20:11 GMT -5
The side shoots are indeed probably clonable. I was simply thinking of what the plant does on it's own (I'll leave aside the question of whether the determinate trait is common in the wild populations (or if it is a mutation that occurred post domestication that has been propagated, since I honestly don't know). By "death clock" I meant something like what a given cultivar of bamboo has, where there is some mechanism in the cells that, even if it is a cutting from another scion of the same variety "now is the time; flower, fruit and die."
It is possible. I also imagine there are such tangles on the Galapagos islands as well. Given that the seeds of S. minor don't really sprout that well in nature unless they have passed through a giant tortoise's digestive tract first, unless there are a LOT of tortoises (which there are not anymore) or each one eats a LOT of tomatoes (which I'm not sure of) the plants must mostly rely on a vegetative method of propagation or they would be exceedingly rare and probably in danger of falling into a Calavaria like extinction event. I think that applies to ALL plants whose disperser has gone extinct, be it a honey locust, a Kentucky Coffee Tree or a Guanacaste; if there is not some way for them to reproduce vegitatively, they're going to go as extinct as the animal that ate them.
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