Isn’t it super annoying that for each plant pot that you have, you need to make sure it gets just the right amount of water; you need to periodically feed it with fertilizer. If you forget to water it once depending on the plant it might wilt and struggle. When pests manage to find their way inside and make themselves at home in your beautiful monstera, it can take days or weeks of effort to get rid of them.
The common factor here is effort. For every need an indoor plant has, you are the only one who can take care of it. This means that the plant is entirely dependent on you.
This article is doing two things simultaneously, I want to take a closer look at the symbiotic relationships of indoor plants, and I want to further explore the idea of creating a notation for symbiosis. Note that the notation is still a work-in-progress, it is not yet set-in-stone.
That being said, let’s continue with the central topic of this article:
Plants in plant pots are almost entirely dependent on you for getting their needs met.
Luckily, this isn’t all bad. Plants are often fun and fullfilling to take care of, and of course there are different benefits too; the indoor air quality might improve a little bit, they can help lighten your mood, many indoor plants are herbs or provide fruit for you to eat.
Clearly, you and your indoor plants are living within a more or less mutualistic symbiosis:
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The caretaker relationship
If you don’t water the plant, it dies. Is this actually a mutualistic symbiosis? There is an assymetry between the benefits and costs received by the human and the potted plant in this relationship.
Take the human out of this relationship and the plant dies. Take the plant out of the relationship? Well, the human might be a little sad, stressed or annoyed, or might not even care much at all! There seems to be more going on than just mutualistic symbiosis here!
I’m not entirely sure yet how I want to denote this kind of a relationship in the notation, but for now it might be sufficient to just use an extra plus. The potted plant gains more from this relationship than the human does.
I’m not completely happy about this notation, because it doesn’t really communicate effectively the idea that the plant is entirely dependent on you. It just looks like the plant benefits more than you do, but there’s more going on than just that.
Regardless, compare this to a relationship with a beloved pet dog. There’s clearly some caretaking going on there as well; You feeds the dog, you water the dog, make sure the dog has a comfortable home, play with the dog and such.
When you leave this relationship, the dog might be able to fare on its own. It could run away and take care of itself. It’s not entirely dependent on you.
Not only that, but the benefits a dog gives you are greater than the ones a plant may give you. It can give emotional support, it can play with you, comfort you and much more. This is much closer to an equal mutualistic symbiosis.
The insects strike
In my apartment, I have a few plants which have been growing here for a longer while. Unfortunately, I also have two pests that I’ve been unable to get rid of for several years now.
Both my lemon tree and my lime tree are infected with mealybugs
Mealybugs feeding on a hibiscus plant source
What bothers me is that somehow, these insects have found their way inside my home, and now that they’re here they’re feeding off of the Lemon tree and the Lime tree. Let’s keep focusing on the Lemon tree for now:
Nothing strange here. What happens if we take both of these relationships and look at them at the same time?
Square brackets indicate a closed ecosystem
When talking about symbiotic relationships between different organisms, we could either be talking about organisms that are part of a greater ecosystem, or sometimes there is very little or even no interaction with the outside world.
The best example of a closed ecosystem is the ecosystem in a jar. A bee and a flowering plant in a field are in part of a much greater ecosystem, and are therefore not surrounded by square brackets:
Note that in the relationship above, “you” are not enclosed within this closed ecosystem even though you do play a role within it. You participate within a much greater ecosystem.
What you’re seeing here is an example of parasitic disruption. Because you’re interacting with a closed ecosystem, nothing else is interacting with the mealybugs other than me and the plant. In practice, this reduces down to where the parasites are affecting me, the caretaker of the plant, directly! The stress that the plant is experiencing is offloaded onto me, because I’m the one taking care of it!
There is an indirect parasitic relationship between me and the mealybugs! What the hell mealybugs! The lemon tree produces less fruit, it’s not growing so well anymore. I need to try and get rid of them which costs me money and/or time.
Making the implicit explicit
There is one particular relationship that is also an important part of symbiosis, which I’ve also touched upon in my earlier article. Sometimes what’s not there is more important than what is there.
I don’t know about you, but I have more than one plant pot in my apartment. It’s already the case that plants have all kinds of relationships with organisms in the soil. Bacteria give the plant nutrients or protect them against particular diseases. Ants, molesand worms loosen up the soil and create room for roots to grow. Fungi can sometimes trade nutrients with plant roots and so on.
But what is notably missing is that plants affect one another as well! Plant pots interfere in this process again as well! Through the soil, plants are connected to a multitude of other organisms.
A shelf with rows of plant pots source
Consider this example, if you’ve read the previous article on symbiosis notation, there’s a way to describe when two organisms have little or no interaction whatsoever.
The shelf above would look something like this
The point here is that there are many relationships that the plants are not having with one another and various insects, bacteria, molds, fungi and much more just because they’re potted.
There is so much these potted plants are missing out on, companion planting, and a huge variety of soil biodiversity interactions. All this is something that we as the caretaker now have to do, and if we don’t? We miss out on what the plant could have been, or we bear the cost in some other way.
This is not what a healthy ecosystem looks like!
All of this just to make extremely explicit that this is not a healthy ecosystem. Go outside, go take a look at some plants in a more biodiverse ecosystem. You’re bound to found some insect infestations on the plants there, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a single spot that is completely overrun by a singular species of parasitic insect.
That’s because insect infestations are kept in check by the rest of the ecosystem. Ladybugs for example, they eat mealybugs!
Cryptolaemus montrouzieri, a species of ladybug which is also known as the mealybug destroyer. source
In turn, some birds eat ladybugs. This is the well-known food chain in action.
Note that there are no square brackets, there are many more interactions within this complex ecosystem. Too many to write down in fact! The more important point is that the ecosystem keeps populations in-check through ecosystem population dynamics
Could we do this differently?
I personally feel like the idea of plant pots is antiquated and outdated. We know much too much about plant biology, ecology, symbiosis and resilience to keep going like this. There is a lot of room for innovation here. There are of course completely alternative ways of growing plants inside that deviate from the standard “plant in a pot” method.
But it’s not like the plant pots are here for good reasons we just don’t know about á la chesterton’s fence, plant pots were initially invented to help with transportation, not because they’re the best way to keep plants around!
There are of course already some different ways of keeping plants inside. Hydroponics is one example, and the simple idea of growing multiple (different) plants in a single container is another.
I’ll leave it there for now
This article doesn’t have a solution in the ending. My plants are still infected with mealybugs and that still stresses me out. I already tried a lot, but it has proved difficult.
There is much more to be said about this topic and I’m not writing this as an exposition of my knowledge on this topic. I clearly still have a lot to learn. I’m publishing this as part of an exploration in growing a notation for symbiosis and relationships in the natural world. I have much more reading to do.
I’m also not quite sure whether the “standard model” of symbiosis is enough to capture more nuanced and complicated relationships such as predation and the caretaker relationship within this notation. It is meant to help us understand how relationships at the individual level create ecosystems and downstream effects that are greater than the sum of the parts.
Further reading
- Edward Haskell and his ideas of co-actions
- Lynn Margulis on Endosymbiosis and symbiogenesis