Circumnutation is a helical organ movement widespread among plants. The word comes from the Latin circum, meaning circle, and nutare, meaning to nod.
- Circumnutations vary in size, regularity and timescale across plant species. But their exact function remains unclear.
- Example: Sunflowers grown in a dense row naturally formed a near-perfect zigzag pattern, with each plant leaning away from the row in alternating directions. This pattern allowed the plants to avoid shade from their neighbors and maximize their exposure to sunlight.
- These sunflowers flourished. This spontaneous pattern formation is a neat example of self-organization in nature.
- Self-organization refers to when initially disordered systems, such as a jungle of plants or a swarm of bees, achieve order without anything controlling them.
