A RIDDLE buried deep within Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been solved almost 150 years after the book was first published.
Within his ground-breaking treatise, Darwin cryptically refers to what has been described as the world’s first ecological experiment. In a short passage, he describes horticultural trials showing that the productivity of a plant community increases as it becomes more diverse.
But details of the experiments have remained a mystery. Now biologists Andy Hector at Imperial College in London, UK, and Rowan Hooper, based at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, have unearthed a…
