Mechanism of Pattern Formation in Living Systems.
---- Vegetation Patterns of Plants ------

We frequently see spot patterns and stripe patterns on fishes and animals. How do they form? What kinds of mechanisms are working on? Their formation mechanism is explained by the Turing model so far. However is that valid for all? Now similar patterns are also observed in vegetation ones in plant ecology. The growth of individual plants is controlled by competition with other plants through allelopathy and plant hormones, and therefore it is quite complicated. However limiting to very initial stage of whole growth, that is a germination and seedling stage, the interaction among individual plants appears only through plant hormones, inhibitory and active ones. The growth dynamics may be extremly simple and can be modeled rather easily. The results of the model calculations show the periodic and irregular, macrosopic and microscopic vegetation patterns depending on the growth stage and on the hormone distributions. The hormones act more effectively at the earlier stage of the growth.


　　　　　Reference
　　　1)S.Kawaguchi, M.Mimura, T.Ohya, H.Okabe and S.Kai, J.Phys.Soc.Jpn., 69(2000)1234.
　　　2)T.Ohya, H.Kurashige and S.Kai, ACH-Models in Chemistry 135(1998)371.




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