Why Are Vines Overtaking the American Tropics?

Science Daily ^ | 02-17-2011 | Staff

[Red Badger]

[Dixie Yooper]

First the scientific community sells us on the fact that evolution is an on going process, then they turn around and despise it when they see it happening before their very eyes...

[Red Badger]

They never got this excited over Kudzu.......................

[Deaf Smith]

If not for these tropical vines, there would not have been any Tarzan movies. Nor the later George Of The Jungle.

.

*Watch out for that tree.

[John Galt's cousin]

Is it from LACK of human activity?

Or, perhaps, it is Bush’s fault!

(/sarc)

[jtal]

Forget about that question, mine is “Why are American taxpayers on the hook for a million dollars to pay for studying vines in Panama?”

[Blueflag]

If a survivable niche exists, a more successful organism will evolve (or emerge) to dominate it.

THAT *IS* a maxim of evolution.

The question becomes, what altered the balance of the prior state? Why now do the vines increasingly dominate?

n.b. — climbing vines need a climbing substrate. Once the vines kill the trees, the next species will dominate the vines. And so on.

[capt. norm]

I held my breath reading it...waiting for the inevitable sentence where they blame it all on global warming.

[NCjim]

My thoughts exactly!

[rockinqsranch]

People are going to read this, and believe it.

[Stosh]

1) Bush’s fault
2) global warming
3) Sarah Palin’s rhetoric
4) intolerant right-wing fundamentalist Christians
5) all of the above

[Lurker]

L

[The_Victor]

They never got this excited over Kudzu.......................

From the article....

In North American forests, invasive vines such as kudzu, oriental bittersweet, English ivy and Japanese honeysuckle often reduce native tree regeneration and survival, although there is no obvious trend as there is in the American tropics. In contrast, two studies of forests in tropical Africa did not detect vine overgrowth.

Looks to me like this isn't a global climate issue, which is what the story wished to insinuate. Something else is afoot.....

[libertarian27]

If not for Vines.....

They'd be walking and building ladders....Slowing the pace of the movies :>)

[meyer]

Where are these “American tropics”?

[Dixie Yooper]

They never got this excited over Kudzu.......................

or Starlings

[Red Badger]

they should check out wisteria...........

[Graybeard58]

They never got this excited over Kudzu....................... I remember when kudzu was a "southern thing". I live in central Illinois and it creeps up the west side of my house.

Originally a Japanese problem. Wonder how it got here? Probably the same way as pythons in the Everglades.

[Red Badger]

Northern South America, Central America and Southern North America.............

[from occupied ga]

more than a million dollars from the U.S. National Science Foundation

more than a million dollars from the beleaguered taxpayers of the usa that would have otherwise been spent on things that the people who actually earned the money wanted. Fixed it.