Why would the plant need nitrogen from the ground when the air is 78% nitrogen?
In: Biology
The nitrogen is *there* but the plants can’t get it. The nitrogen needs to be taken from a gas and bound into organic compounds like ammonia, something plants rely on diazotrophs to do, bacteria and archaea that can “fix” nitrogen into such compounds.
Organisms evolved in ecosystems so while it might be convenient if they could fix nitrogen themselves it just didn’t turn out that way.
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