Increased allocation to defense in female plants is crucial, and feasible, particularly if plants produce Carbon-based defensive compounds, a resource that is not so limited, in comparison to other scarcer nutrients [17].
Particularly, female plants in understory tropical forests can produce defensive compounds based on Carbon, a resource that is not so limited, in comparison to other scarcer nutrients (e.g. nitrogen) [17].
Energy coupling factor (ECF) transporters are responsible for the uptake of essential scarce nutrients in prokaryotes.
ALGAL blooms happen when waste water from farms, factories and dwellings carries large amounts of normally scarce nutrients like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous into rivers, lakes and seas.
Like the pillars of a Gothic cathedral, these giant trees are buttressed; roots run down their sides and extend great distances across the forest floor, making the ground a labyrinth of roots that anchor the trees and grab scarce nutrients from the shallow forest soil.
Other hostile conditions deep in ocean sediments, such as scarce nutrients, high pressure, or extreme salinity, probably set life's limit in some places.
But the vents, which are rich in energy sources for microbes, are poor proxies for most ocean floor sediments, where scarce nutrients could mean a lower thermal limit.
In order to more efficiently compete for the scarce nutrients in the open ocean, Prochlorococcus has undergone "reductive evolution," where it has lost many abilities possessed by its closest ancestors.
While this alone does not prove that Stylidium species are themselves carnivorous, the hypothesis is that the association arose because Stylidium species and the known carnivorous plants obtain scarce nutrients using the same source, namely captured insects.
Then, when transferred to starvation conditions, cells might be able to use this metabolic machinery (and perhaps some form of intracellular nutrient storage) to scavenge whatever scarce nutrients are to be found in the new medium in order to grow and turn on their sporulation and degradative enzyme pathways nearly immediately.
As the primary selective pressure implicated in the genomic reductions for this oligotrophic lineage is to lower the cost of such scarce nutrients for cell production [5], [22], [23], [82], [83], it is reasonable that such a gene would be lost in the absence of selective pressure for its retention.
