Ecosystem withstands attack: Kentucky bluegrass

Lawn ecosystems such as that of Kentucky bluegrass survive attack by weeds by maintaining network connections, community components, and stability.

Biomimicry Taxonomy

	Maintain community >
	Provide ecosystem services >
	Biological control of populations, pests, diseases

Biomimetic Application Ideas

Ecosystem model for advantages of stability, interconnectedness, preservation of all parts of a comm

[Collapse all sections] Summary

"What the threatened lawn must do is take advantage of what makes it different from the weed. For where weeds are, par excellence, solitary hunters, lawn grass is overwhelmingly a tightly grouped species. Most grass blades on your lawn are over eight months old, and some will be over twenty months old. But even more importantly, the whole community of lawn grass might have been growing in the same place for years. And in that time, all stable and steady, it will have had time to acquire friends. Lots and lots of minature friends." [goes on to mention bacteria and fungus]

"There's an entire cabled-up network under your lawn, connecting all the grass roots. It's been building up for the whole life of your lawn and by now can easily shunt liquid food supplies from a well-supplied sector to a threatened one. The weed, though tracking the sun with its antenna and trying like mad to grow fresh roots of its own, can't compete with a system this large and long-established…A single square yard of lawn planted with Kentucky bluegrass can have ten billion root probes. Even if only a fraction of them have had time to build up the connecting fungus cables, that's still many millions of links, and so an extraordinary volume of subterranean space from which any threatened grass blade can, via the shunting network, draw help." (Bodanis 1992:165)

About the inspiring organism

Poa pratensis
Poa pratensis L.
[Kentucky bluegrass]

Some organism data provided by: ITIS: The Integrated Taxonomic Information System
Organism/taxonomy data provided by:
Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life: 2008 Annual Checklist

Bioinspired products and application ideas

Application Ideas: Ecosystem model for advantages of stability, interconnectedness, preservation of all parts of a community, even in simple system like a bluegrass lawn.

Industrial Sector(s) interested in this strategy: Management, manufacturing

References

Bodanis, D. 1992. The Secret Garden: Dawn to Dusk in the Astonishing Hidden World of the Garden. Simon & Schuster. 187 p.

Ecosystem withstands attack: Kentucky bluegrass

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