Why have no plants evolved to move from spot

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Why have no plants evolved the ability to move from spot to spot? Surely that would be a survival advantage not being stuck in one location.

He wants triffids...

Maybe someone will come along with some actual knowledge to assist here, but off the top of my head...

Many plants reproduce on a broadcast method. The ones that grow do so because their seed ended up in an environment that was conducive to their growth. If they land in an inhospitable environment they don't grow. So they're already where they need to be. There's no need for them to move and natural selection suggests that mutations have to be beneficial to persist.

Here's another possibility: movement requires a lot of energy. Can photosynthesis provide enough energy to power movement? I doubt it.

One more: most plants interface closely with the soil through their roots for the purpose of absorbing water and minerals. If that interface is regularly disrupted through movement, it won't function efficiently. Plants are constantly losing water through transpiration so they have to replenish it or they dry out. Maybe a cactus or some succulant that stores water could get around this, but it would still need to root for long periods, I'd have thought.

Biological organisms don't need perfection to survive.

Humans can't fly, elephants can't jump, and tigers can't photosynthesize.
Species with inadequate skills have already gone extinct; the surviving populations only need to have one special skill to thrive.

PS：After searching, I found Selaginella tamariscina, a plant from South America that can "walk". it would die of thirst if it didn't.

Birds move seeds great distances.

If plants could move around freely, it would be a survival advantage. If the environment a plant is in gets bad for the plant, the plant just dies. If the plant had the ability to move around, it could move over to a better environment and survive.

That would be a good scifi movie. "Attack of the Walking Plants"

This discussion reminds me a little of something our Biology teacher said to us at school several decades ago. He was talking about the various ways plants had evolved to avoid the deadly threat of adverse weather conditions in winter, and one of the 'solutions' in his list was that some plants had become annuals, ie they die. Seemed funny to me at the time anyway.

I was thinking of tumbleweed, but I looked it up and they are not living plants when they are in the tumbling stage. They are however filled with living seeds that get dispersed as the tumbleweed tumbles.

But if it was evolutionarily advantageous for plants to be able to move, they would have evolved to move. They function best staying in one spot, apparently, or they would have evolved the ability to move.

Most plants reproduce by having their seeds spread around, so in a way they move around as seeds.

I was certain there is a type of plant that does move...

Fully grown trees that can move by "walking" through growing roots towards it's 'desired' direction and die off roots behind it, few meters per year.

But not to evade prey apparently -- it's just drawn to sunnier places.



It's kinda no different from plants that creeps into different places, grows more of it's roots there...

It's just drawn to the sun and nutrients.
I've seen plants that creeps and roots itself to several pots, meters away from each other.

And still can survive if an earlier root dies; and potentially multiply if it's cut in between.



Hmmm...
It's more like extending it's own 'bodies' to survive better elsewhere than to evade predators.
Or, typical of multiplying themselves via seeds; being able to be either carried by other animals or the wind and thrive where's the safest with more resources...

And ways of defending themselves is to be either be tougher -- tough enough to survive digestive acids as seeds or undesirable be to consumed...
And the obvious stuff like being poisonous, barbed, inconvenient, "adaptive", etc...

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Many animals have evolved to be rooted to the spot, so maybe that's actually more of an advantage?

There are plants that propagate via runners or pieces of root. The roots will move new generations of the plant to a better habitat.
The Tree of Heaven will send out runners if cut down. If you want to get rid of it is advisable to kill it with herbicides before cutting a tree down.