Welcome to Creature, feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and Tipday on the show plants. Plants are often faced with a variety of ferocious predators, which is, you know, us animals, we love eating plants, but plants don't always love being eaten. Now, sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. And being a plant can be hard because you got no mouth, you got no eyes. How are you going
to protect yourself without the handy ability to punch someone. Well, we're going to talk about the creative ways in which plants defend themselves, which can be surprisingly clever. Joining me today is host of the Planthropology podcast, Professor of horticulture, doctor Vicram Buligo.
Welcome.
I'm so excited to have you me too.
I was so happy you reached out and I am thrilled to talk to you today.
I am excited to talk about plants being devious because I think that people have this concept that plants just kind of sit there and then they casually take all the abuse that you know, US animals dole out on them. But no, no, they are out there protecting themselves, making plans, well maybe not making plans, but you know they are they have defenses. They are not damsels in distress.
That's right, for sure. Yeah, and it's it's funny because they do all these things, and I'm sure they find us very confusing, you know, weird hairless apes like this is here to kill anything that eats me, and we're like, ooh, spicy.
Yes, exactly. So first I want to talk about the wonderful world of plant toxins, which are something that you know. Obviously, there are plenty of plants that are toxic to humans, whether we eat them or get them on our bodies. It can be painful or even deadly. But there are some plant toxins that make human life better. It enhances our culinary cultures, and so yeah, a lot of plants produce toxins, and of course toxins can help defend them
from herbivores, including insect, larvae and mammals. It's also a defense against pathogens. But I want to talk about some of the tastiest toxins in plants. So I'm not saying that you should pick the nearest, devious looking flour and put it in your mouth. That can be bad, but some plant toxins are actually pretty delicious, kind of tasty.
Yeah, and it's funny because it's funny you bring that up because recently I posted something on Instagram and TikTok about how we shouldn't eat, you know, incredible toxic plants. Apparently that's controversial if you can imagine, because apparently people like eating their plant toxin sometimes, so you know, we should definitely be careful. I think a lot about the first guy who decided to eat a given plant and
all his buddies standing around taking notes. Yeah, right, you're up, Carl Ford, eat the weird berry.
See if he vomits, and if not, we can eat those berries. Yeah, that was being a chef meant something very different back in the day. Well, what's what's an example of a toxic plant that people try to eat that they shouldn't.
I think my favorite is the coffee tree. I am, you know at this point about seventy three percent caffeine. A friend, a friend of mine likes to say that I died years ago and it's just the caffeine keeping me animated like a zombie. But so, yeah, caffeine is an insecticide. It was developed by the plant to try to keep herbivores off of it, you know, so the leaves to the berries and everything else. It's a strategy to make sure that the seeds survive undigested long enough
to go germinate somewhere else. It just turns out it makes us go fast. Yes, and it's probably the most popular plant toxin in the world, which is a weird way to look at it, but it's also true.
Yes, I mean I live in Italy and it's definitely a big hit here. Gosh, they love their coffee caffeine. I actually I can have a little bit of caffeine usually I have a little bit of tea, but espresso is something that does terrible things to me. I cannot handle it. I turn into a jittery mess. My heart feels like it's having some kind of break dancing competition
in my chest. It's not a good situation. But yeah, for a lot of people, caffeine is a lot of a high dose of caffeine is what they need to get through the day.
Yeah. And I don't know if that was grad school that did that to me that I became you know, so it's kind of it's probably not good, and people do have, like you mentioned, different tolerances to it. Like I can drink a coffee and go straight to bed, which is probably not good in the grand scheme of things. I should probably worry about that. But I can't drink like energy drinks. I don't know if it's the sugar in them or what, but those definitely make me jittery.
But like just coffee, it just sort of levels me off at this point.
Yeah, it's interesting because some people can't handle tea as well. For me, like tea is fine and coffee doesn't work for me. For other people, like tea is actually the things that make them dittery, whereas coffee doesn't. I think everyone's metabolism is different. But in general, humans tolerate caffeine fairly well. It doesn't kill us. I mean, I'm sure there's a level at which it could kill us, but that would be like and it's a lot, that'd be a lot, yes, But yeah, in humans, it impacts our
nervous system. It raises our heart rate, and it can you know, kind of it acts as a stimulant, a mild stimulant. It is a drug. It in that way like it is something that physiologically impacts our body's nervous system, but it's relatively safe. And so you have some caffeine, your heart rate increases, your breathing increases, and for a lot of people that helps them think, maybe that helps
them feel less sleepy. It's stimulating. For some people it just makes you gitterate and you can't focus at all. But you know, depending on who you are, it impacts you potentially in a positive way. But what is a moderate effect in humans is devastating to insects that want to eat the plant. Like you mentioned, this is highly toxic to insects, and it also impacts their central nervous system, but in a much more dramatic way, where as we would get like a little bit of a buzz with insects,
they can be paralyzed, they can even be killed. But there are some insects that can tolerate a cup of joe. In Some caffeine producing plants, like the nectar has a little bit of caffeine in it, and when bees drink that nectar, there's some evidence that it actually enhances their ability to remember that plant's location because it's stimulating the bee a little bit it's giving them, you know, mild buzz pun intended.
I'm sorry, No, I like it. We need more of that. Actually, the more puns the better.
Yes, well you've come to the right podcast for better or worse. But yeah, so it helps these bees kind of remember where the plants are. But for a lot of insects that are actually trying to eat the plant. You know, they're not just sipping nectar. They're trying to directly eat the fruit of the plant. It is causing this very bad reaction in this their system where it is actually potentially killing them. And an added benefit to caffeine in TA plants and other caffeine producing plants is
that it can kill off parasitic fungus. So it is not just something that's wonderful in our coffee. Even though it seems like the plants made this for us to drink, like hey, thanks plants, thanks for thinking of us, It was actually meant for the plants the whole time.
And I think these coevolutionary relationships are so fascinating, and I think that'll come up quite a bit today. But the fact that it's good for bees to a certain extent or the parts of the plant that bees interact with are relatively safe for them. The concentrations are different, but through herbivaly it's like nope, nope, do not passco you know, you know, klay ten hundred dollars. Just like again that plant I posted about, the angel's trumpet, which
is in the Brigmansia genus. For most mammals and most insects like it is incredibly toxic, incredibly toxic. But for their adapted pollinators, they can go in and drink the nectar and they're totally fine. They have the you know, evolutionary basis they need to keep themselves safe from those toxins. And then they go when they spread the pollen and the seeds and all that stuff, and just the the mechanisms that govern some of these relationships are just so fascinating me.
Yeah, the specificity of it is really interesting to me. I did see that post that you made, So the Angel's trumpet, it's a beautiful flowers, this beautiful yellow trumpet like flower. I just want to like stick my nose in there and smell it. Is that a good idea?
Not not great? It's it's not great all parts of the plant. Some people argue that the nectar is not toxic, but I wouldn't risk that all parts of the plane are toxic. There was a creator online a couple of years ago that made this whole video of carrying a couple of flowers around and spending the whole night smelling them.
I guess because somebody had told them that was you know, it's toxic, you can't do that, and they're like, I'm going to do it for the cloud, and then they ended up in the hospital because it can definitely get into your brain that way too, but definitely ingestion is the worst. Yeah. Sure, so they do smell good. They're a beautiful plant. But I tell people, maybe smell them from a distance. Now, a couple feet away, you can
still smell it. Probably don't stick your face in it or blow it like a trumpet, which some people do and kind of explains a lot.
Maybe wafft it from two feet away, you know, Like in chemistry class, you're supposed to wash things because if you stick your nose in the test tube, it could be bad. That was a lesson I learned in chemistry after I stuck my nose into test tube and it made my nose tickle. In a bad way. But yeah, so there are definitely toxic plants we got to watch out for. But yeah, like what you were saying, the specificity of these plant animal interactions really interesting. And that
kind of brings me to talking about spice. So spice, like hot spice, is another delicious plant offering that is actually meant as a deadly defense. Like, how do you tolerate spice seafood? Pretty well? Do you like spicy food?
I do? I do. So my parents are from India, so I'm an Indian guy and we eat all the spices. And I also live in Texas and so we eat all the other different kinds of spices here. So I've grown up eating spicy food and I really like it. My wife, however, like completely just completely out on that, not tolerant at all. So we have to sort of try to meet in the middle sometimes, or I'll just add like spicy stuff to my own food because I don't want her to explode burst into flame.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I also like spice, and I have thought that I've had a pretty high spice tolerance. But I did once order like this super spicy drink that they were like warning me, Hey, this is actually really spicy. It was a I think it was a mango almost like a mango smoothie, but they added some spice to it. I was like, well, I've had spicy drinks before. It sounds great, it sounds refreshing. That was a mistake. It was a mistake I made. That was hubris.
Uh. Too close to the sun there.
Too close to the sun. I was like, four little chili peppers on your menu. I'm sure that's fine. Uh, it wasn't. It wasn't fine, folks, And it's not fine for a lot of things that want to prey on wild chilies. So spices are relatively well tolerated by humans, and we have grown to actually cultivate spicy plants, like the peppers that we have. They're not usually just stuff we pluck from the wild. We've domesticated them, We've grown them, so they have these lovely large fruit that are very
hot and very delicious. But the seeds of wild chilies are also laced with this very spicy substance called kepsasin, which is something that you don't necessarily want in your eyes or your sensitive membranes, but it is something. It is that thing that you know like when you have a spicy food. It's tasty and a little bit or a lot if you're used to it can cause a pleasant feeling, right that like sort of burning to a
certain extent is good. But if you're not as tolerant of it, or you have too much, maybe hypothetically, it's actually quite an unpleasant experience. You start weeping. You have all these responses to it that you know because it is It is irritating your tongue, it is irritating your mucous membranes in your mouth, and in plants, it is a way to help defend themselves against herbivores who do
not like that sensation at all. It can also protect them against insectivores, and interestingly, if they do get bitten by an insect, it leaves them vulnerable to things like fungus. And then that spice that kept sayesin actually acts as a weight an anti fungal the world's most delicious anti fungal treatment.
And more of them should be delicious. Yeah, And I think it's interesting because you mentioned that we have bread and developed peppers of different kinds to be hotter or less hot, or of different flavor. But some of those wild ones, like the tiny little bush chilis and stuff that are out there that are tiny and like bright purple, will absolutely like take the roof off your mouth like they're nuclear hot, and it'll taste very good. So we have done a lot of work on a lot of
our plants. And that's something I think that's important to realize too, is that the wild types of a lot of these things, the you know, ancestral sort of plants that led to what we have in our market now are not what we see. We've worked so much to select for things that we want and improve, like you said, fruit size and flavor and color and all this stuff, that there's some plants out there there, you know, genetically very similar that would not be recognizable to most like most consumers.
Yeah, yeah, Like you look at a wild banana, it is not oh yeah, the comfortable handheld banana of today. It's full of these large seeds that it is tiny, and there's like hardly any fruit flesh in there that you would eat without getting also a mouthful of seeds, because the banana doesn't really just want to be eaten. It wants its seeds to be distributed, so it wants you to eat the fruit and the seeds, and then what happens later, well, pody times and hey, you've planted a new banana plant.
Yeah, and you know now we clone most of them to be seedless. And so the big curved yellow fruit everyone knows and loves, like you said, doesn't really exist in nature that way. A point I wanted to make too about since we're talking about peppers. So many plants in the sulinacy family are just incredibly toxic in one way or the other. It's just that we've happened to find a few that will work for us, like tomatoes, and well, the tubers of potato plants, you know, they're great.
The berries onto amato plants are not great. We call them night shades for a reason. You know, you eat the fruit and you eat the toxins, and then it pulls the shades down and you go to sleep for a while nighttime, maybe a long while. So yeah, but all of the plants in that genus to a certain or in that family to a certain extent. You know again, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, tomatillos, and even the angel's trumpet that we were talking about earlier is in the same family, and I think in
belladonna and several others. It's like all these plants that are incredibly toxic all kind of hang out in this same family, in the same genus. And then again, poor Carl, the product tester, each product tester was out there eating sulinaceous berries and like, oh, the tomatoes are okay, those ones are okay, those didn't. Like Carl's not.
Asleep, Yes, sleeping, Carl was yes, long na, very long long time now exactly. Yeah, no, it is so interesting. And yeah, the the fact that it, of course, you know, we can't we would have to like depend on other humans to know if something is deadly to us, because things that are deadly to humans may not be deadly to some animals or vice versa. Like we might be able to tolerate things other animals or insects might perish from.
And what's interesting to me like that that specificity of selecting, uh, the the animals that the plant might actually benefit from. So in the case of wild chilis and plants that have capt sation, it actually is something that doesn't impact birds, which is really interesting, Like any like if that bird had my mango slushy it would drink that down, no problem. It would laugh in my face because birds are not
really impacted that spice, the hot spice. They lack the receptors that would cause that reaction, and while it would cause pain to another herb before the bird's okay. And the reason it's thought that plants have developed this relationship with birds where the birds can eat something no problem, and the plants have never really tried, well tried, they've never really evolved. A defense mechanism against the birds is that the birds are a great vehicle for distribution for
their seeds. The birds, they don't really have gnashing teeth, right, so if they eat a fruit, they're going to swallow it hole. To a certain extent, there's a little bit of you know, rolling around in their gizzard and mashing it up with stones. But like you know, they are great for picking up seeds, eating the fruit. They digest the fruit, but the seeds survive through their digestive tract and then they fly off somewhere far away and they
poop them out. And a great thing about that delivery mechanism is that a plant doesn't necessarily want all its babies all in the same location because they are all competing for the sun, they're all competing for nutrients. You want some dispersion of plants, otherwise they're not as likely to survive.
Absolutely, and we see that with a lot of plants. There is a native plant in my area called the Yopon holly and the leaves actually we were talking about caffeine earlier, have caffeine in them, and so the native indigenous people of my area as well as cowboys that lived in this area would make tea and coffee like they call the cowboy coffee that they would make out of the leaves and it was mildly caffeinated. And urbamate comes from a similar plant. But the scientific name of
this plant is Ilex vomitoria for a reason. Has these bright red pretty berries that are you know, colorful through the winter. So a lot of people would try to forage on them because it was the only thing that was you know, ripe during the winter months in this area. And they will ruin your day. Won't kill you, but
you'll have a bad couple of days. Yeah. But birds, their metabolism is immune, and so they'll spread those seeds far and wide, and you know, those relationships are really just again very very interesting and reproductive strategies and plants and dispersal strategies and plants are so weird in a lot of ways, and they've evolved to be so bizarre from like a animal perspective that they don't look like I think a lot of us think they should sometimes
but it's like no bird, please eat this, please fly away, go somewhere else.
Yeah, yeah, the sort of I mean, obviously, a single plant is not making a plan, it's not deciding to have these things happen. But I think it's it's really interesting when you think about, like the almost like the fact that plants have developed these evolutionary strategies that are actually really clever. It's it kind of shifts your perspective on like, plants aren't just like these inert, passive things
when it comes to evolution. They are responding to their environment, albeit slowly, right Like an individual plant may take along a lot longer than you know an animal to respond to its environment. Although some plants do have the ability to like clam closed or flick something off, kick something with a little trigger, which I always find fun to see these plants that have those sort of like explosive triggers.
But yeah, it over a really long time scale. In terms of evolution, they're very actively they're very actively adapting to their environment, and they are interacting with animals, sometimes aggressively and sometimes cooperatively for sure.
And just as a quick sidebar, and I just thought of this as we were talking. We were talking about breeding efforts and all that, and solinaceous plants and plants in the Sulinacy genus in dealing with climate change. We're noticing that some of our staple crops like tomatoes and egg plants and a few other things are struggling a lot more. The pollen grains d nature over a certain temperature and so we don't set fruit as well all that, so we're trying to figure out how to make them
more heat tolerant. There is a closely related plant in the same genus, the Solanum genus, called silver leaf night shade. It's like a common weed around here. It's a perennial weed with like super poisonous little berries, so good, but it'll take incredibly extreme temperatures like one hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit. It'll still set flowers and fruit like credible temperatures. So they're trying to breed some of that heat tolerance back into eggplants, just as you know, some trials. Uh,
and they keep just coming up with poisonous egg plants. Yeah, that's what I thought might which is, you know, objectively pretty funny.
Yeah.
Uh, not great in terms of what we're trying to do, but uh, some of these efforts take time, and there's so many like specific things, and like passing on some of these traits can be so difficult. Like I think we'll get there, uh, but we just need to make sure we don't put out a whole bunch of poisonous plants.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a tall order, I think, to try to quickly adapt plants for our broken planet when it took us so many years just to like make an edible broccoli. You know, you don't. You don't turn a wolf into a dog in like a day. But yeah, I mean it takes a minute. It's I mean, it's
not impossible, but it's tricky for sure. Uh, And there's gonna you know, there's always these unexpected consequences of fiddling with a sort of these selective adaptations, which are always fun for Carl to discover when he has to taste the egg plant.
Yep, yep for Carl or Carl.
Well, we're going to take a quick break, but when we get back, we're going to talk about plants out smarting their enemies. So we are back, and like we kind of were talking about before, it's sort of hard to imagine a plant being clever or smart due to the lack of brains or central nervous system, Like, is there any is there really like anything to plants that is sensory? Can they respond to their environment in any way?
They respond to their environment in a lot of ways, and we're finding out through more and more research that they respond in ways that we didn't really like attribute to them. So you know, the biggest one is light. Right, Like light, it drives the way that they grow, the directions they grow. They respond to gravity, they respond to temperature, and they can sort of adjust their metabolism in response
to that. For example, when it starts getting towards fall and the days get shorter, they get less sunlight, the temperatures get cooler, they'll change some of the chemical structure in the sugars that they're putting out to help winerize themselves, or the chlorophyll will drain out of the leaves and we see these other pigments that give us like pretty fall colors, and so that's definitely a response to the environment. We also see something interesting when plants are grown in competition.
Have you ever heard the term crown shyness?
No, I haven't.
So if you look at so if you were to stand in a mature forest, a deciduous forest, and look up, you know where you would think that all the trees would grow together, you'll actually see gaps between them where the crowns of these trees are trying not to touch each other, and it looks really cool from above. I've seen some like drone and aerial footage of like gaps
like lines and gaps between trees. And some of the mechanisms for that is they you know, blow into each other and little twigs get broken off and they grow
in different directions and things like that. But there have been a couple studies that suggest that while like leaves on trees or leaves on plants mostly absorb red and blue light, a little bit of yellow and reflect mostly green, they still do have receptors in some of these pigments that will absorb green light, and it's thought, and again this is a little bit hard to prove that they
can quote unquote sort of see each other. And so green light reflecting off the leaves of one plant bounce into the receptors of another plant at a certain like frequency, as certain intensity, and the plant can kind of detect, oh, there's another plant over here, I should put more into growing away from it. And so there's these complex mechanisms that they respond to each other. But then also things
like organic compounds floating in the air. Tomatoes tomatoes, if you've ever grown tomatoes, they have a really really specific smell, like they nothing really smells like a tomato plant.
Yeah, it's not tomatoes or tomato sauce doesn't really smell like a tomato plant. Tomato plant. I really love the smell of a tomato plant, by the way, but it is different. It's like it is.
It's really and it's really an interesting, unique smell. But they have these little hairs on them called tricomes that have a little bulb on the end, and when you brush against them, those bulbs explode and releases release these volatile organic compounds into the air, which other tomato plants
can detect and start producing defense compounds against herbivory. So like, if a caterpillar is chewing on tomato plant A, it'll release these compounds into the air that other plants in the community can detect, and they'll start sort of like
circling the wagons, so to speak, before they're preyed upon. Also, some of the predators of caterpillars and herbivores can detect these compounds, so like wasps will come in and start feeding on caterpillars or some birds I believe can detect it, and they'll come and start picking things off.
So these are the evolutionary snitch technique.
That's exactly right. They call in reinforcements, they cry for help, and it's again this complex sort of communication web, which we don't really attribute to plants very often. Yeah, because they're not, like, they don't have mouths, which I think I'm happy about. I don't really want to know what.
They have to say, but I just don't want to see a pair of lips on a plant, honestly. But no, I mean, I agree, I think that we underestimate plants. You know, obviously a lot of These reactions are not you know, an indivi plant thinking it through, but when you zoom out on an evolutionary scale, it's really really clever. What these plants have, you know, over many years of evolution come up with so speaking of being mean to caterpillars because hey, I love plants, so I love bullying
a caterpillar. Because caterpillars are sure, they're cute. I mean, some are a little bit gross, but they are a larva and their whole thing is to eat as much as they possibly can. They are just like tubes with a mouth and a butt and a desire to consume the world because they need I mean pretty much just with extra details. So they need all of that energy to fuel a transformation from the caterpillar form into a
moth or butterfly. It's a costly transformation, so they need to consume a lot of food and they can absolutely decimate a plant. And what's especially obnoxious for plants is the fact that butterflies and moths will often intentionally lay their eggs on their plant of choice to set up they're young with basically a plant trust fund. So they hatched and it's like great, I'm already sitting on food and then they eat that whole plant. So some plants
have developed a very clever defense. So the passion flower is like, it's actually a whole genus of beautiful flowers. They're almost like hypnotizingly beautiful.
Strange.
Yeah, yeah, they look like they are some kind of alien eyeball. It's really beautiful. It's just like wavy sunbursts. Some are like this vibrant purple, some are these bright reds. They're mostly found in Central and South America. They're also found in Mexico and the US. And the Heliconis butterfly genus is just as beautiful. It's got these beautiful black, yellow and orange wings and it is also found in the passion flowers territory. So we've got a little bit
of conflict, a little bit of tension here. So these butterflies, despite being vicious plant murderers, are actually really good parents. They want their babies set up for a good future. So if they spot a plant that's already laden with butterfly eggs, they'll actually move on because they don't want
their babies to have to compete with other caterpillars. It's kind of like how plants like to disperse their seeds because they don't want their I mean want quote unquote, it is not advantageous for their offspring to have to compete with other plants. In the same way, it's not advantageous for these butterfly offspring to have to compete with other offsprings. So the better strategy is to wait until
you find a plant that doesn't have these eggs. So some species of fash and flower have developed a strategy of mimicking the presence of butterfly eggs with bumps on their leaves. So from what I can tell, it seems like these are essentially like these sort of swollen glands that are on the leaves and they they're like they're three dimensional bumps that kind of look like an egg has been laid there, and.
It's yeah, and it's if you look at it, it really does look like little clusters of butterfly eggs or you know, caterpillar eggs. However, you want to kind of cut that, and they tend to lay them these neat little rows in these little clusters, and that is what the plant has figured. I mean, again, we talk about we anthropomorphize a lot when it's hard.
Not to it is, it's really hard not to. I even do it with my houseplants. I like talk to them. I know that talking to them isn't actually helping them, Like there's that whole thing of like, oh, you talk to your plants, it's good for them. It's that's not exactly. You'd have to be huffing on them a whole lot for them to notice the co two you're producing. But I still do it because I love them. It's just so hard not to anthropomorphize plants, especially when they're so smart like this one.
Yeah, and you know, and I actually have a theory about the talking year plants thing. I think, you know, as humans will pack bond with literally anything. Yes, Like I've got googly eyes on all like half of my
plants back here so I can talk to them. But I think subconsciously we probably care for things better when we anthropomorphize them a little bit, when we give them personalities and names and stuff, and so that's you know, I think it's more in us thing than the plants thing, which is to me kind of fascinating.
We're projecting onto them probably like all my plants personalities are probably my untreated issues that I have but anyways, moving.
On anyway, Yeah, but now there are just really ingenious, clever strategies, and I think that you know, over time we discover more and more and more of these, and as our world sort of changes around them, we see new things popping up and new responses to things that we put into the environment and all of that, and that it kind of blows my mind that, yes, plants do adapt on a grand scale fairly slowly, but when we really push them evolutionarily, like, they'll adapt pretty quick.
Their genomes are so flexible. They have you know, every single plant cell has all its DNA, so it can be any plant cell. And because of that, they have this really swift adaptation at times to different things. And again they just need the right push and they kind of start figuring things out, so to speak.
Can you think of an example of plants adapting to sort of human influence and not like not our sort of selective unnatural selection of plants, but a wild plant sort of I know, I don't want to put you on the spot, but like a wild plant adapting to sort of human influence environmental changes, so.
You know, evolutionarily, I don't know specifically, but I think often of plants that if even if they're not like actively adapting the things, they're taking advantage of human intervention. So a great example is a plant called kudzuo, which is this super aggressive vining plant that they planted throughout the southeastern US and I believe it's I'm probably going to be wrong about this. It's I believe it's native
to parts of South America. Really aggressive, grows on hillsides, and they planted it throughout Georgia and the American southeast for soil conservation. So they were like, oh, this grows fast, it grows lots of roots. We can plant it on a hillside. The hillsides won't slide into our cities anymore, which is if you are someone who enjoys cities, having mountains not end up in the middle of it is
usually useful. But this, yeah, this plant though, is so aggressive outside of its native habitat, where you know it has some checks and balances from herbivy and different things that like you can look at six month time lapses of like houses disappearing and like telephone poles just looking like trees just covered in kudzoo, and they're so adept to growing on anything like even porous like brick, or like they grow on trees natively, so they'll grow up
telephone poles and cover wires. So you know, it's not necessarily that they have evolved that rapidly to overcome some things. But they're just so well adapted to some of the regions where we throw them that they're like, oh, yeah, no, this is great. I'll grow everywhere and you can't stop me.
The unstoppable plant. I wonder why we haven't had a horror movie about Kadzoo.
It seems like other should be.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean like winds, because we did have We had the happening, but I feel like that wasn't as exciting as like a vine that grows so fast it can just devour you.
Yeah, if your dog stands still too long. Yeah, you know. Actually a better example probably in it's not something that we have purposefully selected for, but we're seeing wild populations of plants developing lots of herbicide resistance in agricultural lands, so where we go out and we spray herbicides to like control weeds in our field, keep our fields clean and all of that. You know, any kind of chemical
intervention selects for resistant populations. Right, if you're not getting rid of every individual, the ones that survive in general have resistance, and that's why we have or can develop resistance. Like that's where we're seeing like you know, antibiotic resistant
staphylococcus and all these other things. So we have an amaranth it's called palmer amaranth that's a really common like agricultural weed out in our part of the country here in the US, and some of the common herbicides that have been used over the past thirty years through like bad application practice, overuse, all of these things, we have populations of this weed now or this plant weed is
sort of a loaded, you know, stigmatized subjective kind of term. Yeah, but we've got populations of this plant that are almost completely resistant to these herbicides that just worked a decade ago, and now you can't control them in a lot of our fields, and they're crossing out with wild populations. And we're seeing a lot of those types of problems with really aggressive plants, maybe introduced plants that are starting to
move into and cause problems in native ecosystems. And so that is I mean, that's pretty rapid adaptation and evolution over ten twenty years of just hard selecting for resistant populations.
So what you're saying is we are breeding an army of unstoppable superplants that should have a grudge against us because we did try to kill them.
Yeah, yeah, no, and yeah. And they'll play you know, ads for chemical companies as propaganda if they ever become sentient, that'll just be in a loop somewhere.
Well, we're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to kind of change gears to friendship. So we are back, and you know, this podcast we talk about a lot of grim stuff. We talk about a lot of you know, animals eating animals, plants eating animals, animals eating plants. But what about friendship? Is their room for friendship? Absolutely yes, So I think
that sometimes the best defense is good friendship. And for plants, this makes a lot of sense because they don't have jaws, they don't have legs, they don't have arms, they can't just like punch a goat in the face. So who can protect them? Well, they can make friends with an animal perhaps who has something in it for them, Right, Like in most cases when you have a friendship between one species and another, even if it crosses kingdoms, you
need to provide some benefit for the other. So some plants will team up with ants who can protect their new plant friend from herbivorous insects and even even herbivorous mammals. So the deal works like this. So the plant will offer the ant some tasty nectar, and so the ants they're happy they have a good thing going here and will defensively attack any insects trying to bite their sugar planty.
And basically the plants will pay the ants in nectar maybe refuge in exchange for protection, which is you know, I mean, it's a little bit like the ants are a mafia, but it's also you know, kind of a fun mafia situation.
Acute yeah, yeah, acute mafia. And that is such a fascinating relationship because I mean, ants are intelligent, organized little insects, at least at a sort of you know, population level, a colony kind of works together, and I mean, it's amazing what ants will do. But we see this a lot on like acacia trees. We see it on mesquite trees,
which your native to Texas where I live. And so you'll be walking around and you'll just see these trees covered with ants, and the ants are going after these extra floral nectaries which come out of leaves in different places, and yeah, the plant pays them in in sugar water essentially.
Yeah, I love acacia trees actually, so like bullhorn Acacia trees, which are found mostly in Central America, have definitely developed a strong friendship with ants. So they attract ant queens with their scent, and ant queen will take up residents. Actually inside the it's called bullhorn because it has like these two little like double horn thorns. They're not they're
not little thorns. They're like big gnarly horns like you could you could die if you fall on one, but they're actually hollow and inside of these horns the ants can take up residents. And so it's like these little barracks for all these ants to live in, and throughout the tree there's all sorts of sets of these horns. It's very metal to like house your army inside bullhorns that are also very pointy and sharp and.
Stabby, giant hollow needles full of ants. That's a there's another nightmare for you.
And so these ants will protect the acacia bullhorn acacia, and they will actually attack other plants that try to grow over the acacia. So sometimes you have plants versus animals, but sometimes you have plants versus plants like vines. Invasive vines like the kudzu that you talked about, can be bad news for a plant. It's actually sort of a parasitic relationship because the vine will climb the plant, use the plant as a structure to get sunlight, to get
more resources. Some plants actually like directly steal nutrients from their host plant, so it's a bad situation. But the ants will actually attack any vines trying to grow on their beloved acacia tree. They will also sting herbivorous mammals these huge things, right, Like, what can you do as a plant against a big mammal trying to eat you. Well, you got a little lant, buddy, and it's got a very very painful sting, and it'll attack anything trying to chomp down on it.
Yeah, just so fascinating. And I've always thought it's interesting that ants will do that with aphids too. So on the other side of this relationship, they'll protect a fids. They farm aphids, which is the weirdest thing to think of.
So cute I think it is. I mean, like it's a little gross, right, because aphids like instead of melking them, they sort of like squeeze out sugary substance called honeydew from their butts and the ants slurp it up. But you know, it's kind of cute. It's a little bit cute because basically ants are farmers. They have these little little a fids. They also farm scale insects. Those scale insects are these peny tiny insects that look like little
barnacles almost. They're actually not great for plants or like the Bulbornicacia, because they'll stick on to the leaves or the you know, twigs, and they will suck out sap. But the ants will actually milk the scale insects for their honey, do that sugary substance and will protect the
scale insects. So it's kind of something where the ants may be simultaneously protecting this tree but also doing a little farming, and that farming of the scale insects isn't great for the tree, but on average, the ants do more benefit for the tree then they harm the tree, So it works out.
Yeah, industrious little things, aren't they.
Yes, I like though that they you know, because farming, you could do farming where you're protecting the land and respet afecting your environment, which is not something that humans often have in modern history. Were not great at that. But you know, these little ants they've got it figured out. They can farm on the tree but also protect the tree.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
It's very cool. I really love these relationships between the plants and these ants. It's just it's like, I imagine them having this beautiful friendship, this little ant society that loves their tree. Uh. There was that movie about it. I think it was called Avatar, and it was all about the ant colony. But they were big and they were blue, and they lived in a magical tree and yeah.
They controlled like sky dragons with their hair. I don't know.
Yeah, that was it was very accurate to the.
World of ants. Yeah, I think it was a documentary.
Actually, Yeah, I do feel somewhat cheated out of getting a really good ant movie that first of all, all the ants that do anything are always dudes, which sucks, it's not true. Yeah, and also like the just showing ants at like a realistic movie showing them like farming and cultivating and protecting trees, and that would be great.
Come on, guys, yeah, I would watch that. I want to see that.
I yes, see, you've already got two viewers, Hollywood, get on that.
That's all you need, right.
I I completely agree. Well, is there anything else that you want people to know about plants and how they are not as helpless as we think?
Oh gosh, so many things you know, from like we were talking about different types of thorns and spines and like physical defenses, and sometimes they combine the two. Sometimes they fill their spines with ants. You know. I just think that, you know, plants are nothing if not survivors on this planet. They sort of form and I like to think about it that plants are both at the bottom end at the top of our food webs. You know, they are food for, either directly or indirectly pretty much
all life on the planet. But then at the end of the day, they're nutrient cyclers as well. They're just really patient. As things break down in the soil, they turn them into more plants, and you know, the cycle continues. And I think that I like to say that plants always win in the end, they just they just have a lot of patients one way or the other.
That seems menacing. It sounds like when the super plant uprising that we have inadvertently bred with our herbicides.
You're gonna be on they're ready for us.
You're going to be on the plant side, Like are you a plant? Are you a plant? Plant?
You'll never know. I'll never tell, But no, I think it's it's just for me. It's just such a cool picture of you know, all these relations just we've been talking about, plus so many more positive ones of you know, how plants respond to different insects, both in a friendly sort of way and in a defensive sort of way. It it shows me pictures of things that are fascinating
and worth protecting and worth maintaining. So I think the more people learn about how complicated these relationships are and how susceptible they can be to you know, climate change and things like that should be encouragement for us to do better and keep finding new things and keep protecting these things.
I absolutely agree. I think that plants are sometimes overlooked when we think about like protecting the environment, because a panda bear that's really cute and cuddly, and we want to protect it. A koala, Hey that's huggable. It's really not. It would rip your face off, but we think it's We think it's huggable.
They look cuddly, they.
Do cuddly until you hear them scream. But yeah, I mean it is something I think that is really important to you know, really appreciate plants as Hey, we would not be here without plants at It's just what it wouldn't happen. It's where we live, it's how we eat, it's how we breathe, it's everything. And they're not They're not just passively sitting there. They are actively adapting. They
have amazing adaptations. They respond to their environments. So even though this podcast is typically animal themed, I am very much pro plant and I will immediately surrender the plant uprising.
Oh yeah no, I'm not fighting them. I'll just I'll welcome our new overlords.
Well, on that note, before we go, we've got to play a little game, and that game is called Gifts. Who's Squawking the Mystery Animal Sound Game? Every week I play a mystery animal sound and you the listener, and you the gifts, try to guess who is making that sound. Last week hint was this this little guy isn't happy about being put in the discount beIN.
I'm gonna be real bad at this.
To be fair, I don't think I would get this one if I hadn't, if I didn't do this myself.
Uh all right, I'm gonna guess, did you said discount Ben, I'm gonna say, hamster.
You're close, sort of close. This is actually budgets frog. Congratulations to Auntie Bee, Joey P, and Violta F who all guess correctly. It is a species of frog that is often kept as a pet, and it is notable or being a squat little guy who's very weird looking.
I identify strongly with that squat little guy who's weird looking now in my head because you said I was close. Like hamsters are just amphibious frog or like frogs are amphibious hamsters, Yeah, pretty much for me.
I mean hamsters. They have these cheek pouches where they can stick anything in their mouth indiscriminately, and frogs will also put anything in their mouths indiscriminately. It's you know, they could be friends if probably they didn't try like eating each other, which I show. I imagine a frog comes up to a hamster and is trying to get that hamster into its mouth, while the hamster is trying to get the frog into its mouth in sort of
a oraboros type fashion. But yeah, this is found in Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay. But yeah, it is kept as pets, which you know, I don't think this is the worst of the pets, of the exotic pets, but I'm something of the opinion that it's it's tricky. I think to keep a frog make it happy. It's also called the Freddy Krueger frog. I think that's because its skin is kind of pale
and it screams. I'm not really sure why it's called that, how many people even call it that, or if it's just like fans of the frog.
See I'm having the oh wow, that is not what I expected this guy to look like. It is Wednesday, my dudes.
It is the Wednesday my Dude's frog. Okay, okay, there is a meme call it It's Wednesday, my dudes, and it's a little frog saying it's Wednesday, my dudes. You know Internet humor.
I'm glad to know that this guy exists.
But yeah, they will just pretty much eat anything they want. They will. They're quite aggressive, thus the extremely shrill and angry squeaking they will. They will puff themselves up. They will eat other frogs if they can fit them in their mouths. Pretty much anything that goes in their mouths they will eat. Even as tadpoles. They will try to eat each other. They're kind of baby cannibals, so that's fun.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Always love a baby cannibal. On to this week's mystery animal sound. This hollering little fella may not sniff so many butts, but it does love digging. Hello, so it is not the man saying hello, good morning.
That's Carl.
That's Carl. Hi, Carl, thanks for writing all those deadly nightshade plans for us. Do you have any guesses?
I think I actually know what this is. I think that is a praank.
You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to bleep out your answers so our listeners can't cheat, but they will know that you guess correctly. Congratulations, it's as I think you know who was making that adorable little You can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com uh, doctor Boliga, where can people find you? You were so lovely to have on the show.
Oh it was so much fun. I really enjoyed this. I am all over the internet for better or worse. You can find me at the Plant prof on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, and you can also find my podcast Planthropology on Instagram, in Twitter and Facebook.
I try so hard to avoid TikTok, but I have to admit your plant videos are one of the only things I do not avoid that I must consume. I love I love them so much. I also love the debunking of DIY plants. Thanks.
I will never know case on the internet.
So you mean, if like I hack up a plant and then shove that plant inside a banana peel, I won't get a beautiful bush.
You know you'll get something probably fruitflies.
Well at least I'm growing somebody. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you so much for listening. And hey, thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts.
Or Hey guess what.
Wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I don't judge you. See you next Wednesday. M