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Answer :
Final answer:
Mistletoe causes harm to spruce trees by extracting water and nutrients from the tree's vascular system, disrupting essential functions like sugar transport and water transpiration. This can lead to symptoms such as wilting, leaf necrosis, and eventually tree death, much like physical damage to the cambium or disease infections.
Explanation:
When mistletoe extracts water and nutrients from the vascular system of the spruce tree, it uses a host tree's vascular cambium — the layer responsible for producing new xylem and phloem cells. The phloem is essential for moving sugars throughout the tree, while the xylem is required for water transpiration.
Because mistletoe is a parasitic plant, it disrupts these critical functions, leading to symptoms such as wilting, reduced growth, and eventually the death of the spruce tree. This situation can be likened to the effects of physical damage to the cambium, such as when bark is removed, or the girdling of a tree by rodents.
Conifers like spruces are adapted to conserve water with needle-shaped leaves and sunken stomata; however, when mistletoe invades, it causes dehydration, leading to symptoms like leaf necrosis and a flaccid appearance. Furthermore, if the infestation becomes severe, the plant can exhibit chlorosis, abscission of older leaves, and even necrosis in recently expanded leaves and new growth as a result of the disruption to water and nutrient flow.
It's important to note that severe infestations can lead to an outcome similar to that caused by soil salinity problems or bacterial and viral infections in plants, where the essential transport systems within a plant are compromised, limiting its ability to efficiently move water and nutrients, which is critical for its survival.
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