The water sources used by epiphytic, hemiepiphytic, and arborescent life stages of Didymopanax pittieri were investigated in the tropical cloud forest reserve at Monteverde, Costa Rica. Each life stage was hypothesized to obtain its water from a different location because of differences in terms of where each stage placed its roots. Stable hydrogen isotope analyses of source and plant water samples confirmed that when plants were epiphytic they used water from canopy mats and from occult precipitation (mist, cloud water, and fog) while the arborescent life stage used only water in the soil from recent rainfall; the hemiepiphytic life stage used a mixture of these different water sources. These data demonstrate that along with changes in the life stage of this plant species come changes in its patterns of resource utilization. The generality of this finding for other tropical hemiepiphytes needs to be investigated.
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Feild et al. (1998) studied this question.
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