The necessity to protect the xylem transport system against theeffects of cavitation and airlocks may explain why tracheids havepersisted in the flowering plants alongside vessels. The vessels, withno barriers to water flow between cell and cell, offer much lessresistance to water flow than tracheids, where water must passfrom tracheid to tracheid through the cell wall, mainly throughpits. Moreover some vessel elements are extremely narrow, therebeing normally a range of widths of vessel elements in the sameplant organ. Volume flow through a tube is proportional to the fourthpower of the radius of the tube. Hence a two-fold increase in the radiusof a vessel from say, 5 mm to 10 mm would increase volume flow (forthe same tension) 16-fold (24 = 16). Since wide vessels are so muchmore efficient for a bulk flow of water, why should a vascular bundlecontain, in addition to wide vessels, narrow vessels and tracheids?The most probable answer is that this gives the plant the flexibility toreact efficiently to varying environmental water status. When thesoil C is high the plant does not require very high tensions in thexylem to extract the water; in such a situation, most of the transpir-ation stream would pass through the widest vessels, which offer the
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