A common plant in saline areas Why is tamarix not salted to death?

There are many saline-alkali lands in the great northwest of China.

That's what makes most plants feel terrible. Because the soil contains too much salinity, plants cannot absorb the water necessary for survival from the saline soil, and will eventually die of thirst; If the plant absorbs a lot of water into the body, it will eventually be salted to death. However, saline-alkali land is not barren land, and there is a class of salt-alkali tolerant plants in the plant kingdomTamarix, which is a common plant in saline-alkali areas.

Tamarix is also called Sanchun willow: it is a small deciduous tree with the same shape as the weeping willow.

There is a resemblance, with thin and soft branches hanging down, but the leaves are small, like the scaly leaves of a cypress tree. If you look closely at the tamarix, you will see that there are white crystals on its stems and leaves, and if you put the crystals in your mouth and taste them, you will immediately feel salty and bitter.

What exactly are these crystals? It turns out that when the roots of Tamarix absorb water from the saline-alkali soil, they also inhale a large amount of salt and alkali, and if these saline-alkali substances accumulate in the body, the plant will definitely not be able to stand it, but Tamarix has a special salt-alkali resistant organ - the salt gland.

with a magnifying glass. If you look at it, you can see that the stems and leaves of Tamarix are densely covered with salt-secreting glands, which are composed of epidermal cells and secretory cells, and their main function is to remove salt. Salt glands can excrete excess salt inhaled by the plant body, attach to the surface of the stem and leaves, blow it away by wind, or use rain to flush it out and let the salt return to the soil.

In addition to Tamarix, there are other plants that are resistant to salinity. For example, there is a class of impervious plants whose root cells are very little permeable to salts and absorb little or no salt from the soil, but this type of plant usually grows only in areas with low salinization.

Summary:The so-called saline-alkali land is a type of salt accumulation, which refers to the land where the salt content in the soil is too high, and the high content of salt affects the normal growth of crops, and some serious saline-alkali soil areas are almost no grass.

Because this creature can remove excess salt from the body, and this creature is not very demanding of students, it will not be salted to death.

Because this tamarix is a halophyte, it is not afraid of salt, so it can still grow well even if it stays in saline soil.

Because this plant is already suitable for such a living environment, the plant can remove some of the substances in the soil without affecting their growth.

Because the characteristics of this plant are such that they can adapt to this kind of salty place, they will not be salted to death, and they may be changed to a more normal place, and they will not survive yet.