Sunflowers grow strategically

Sunflowers are tricky when it comes to getting as much sun and shade as possible.

Sunflowers have a tricky strategy to get a lot of sun.

Agricultural scientists from Buenos Aires have discovered that the flowers tend to tilt right and left to optimize the incidence of light. This self-organized symmetrical zigzag arrangement is described by the researchers in the PNAS paper. Experiments with very close planted sunflowers showed that the plants regularly evade the shadowy neighboring plants and form self-organized patterns. According to this, a leading sunflower grows normally, but the growing directly behind it is inclined by about ten degrees in one direction out of the shade, the flower in the third row returns to the opposite direction - and so on. This results in a wave-like symmetrical pattern, which results in an increase in yield of up to 50 percent on the whole field.