Oh hey, it's your old roommate who always found the best furniture on the side of the road. Ali Ward, did you know that you love ferns? Not yet, said tight, you're about to. I'm going to tell you one person who loves ferns. It's this guest. In fact, I first saw this ologist in this quick video about ferns, and they were wearing a shirt that said iHeart ferns, but the heart was a fern geme to fight. You're going to find out everything about that later. And they said
that ferns were fantastic. This is in the first five seconds of the video, and I was like, they're on And they wrote the twenty twenty five book Ferns Lessons in Survival from the Earth's Most Adaptable Plants. And they're an associate professor at Cornell's Boyce Thompson Institute. They got their PhD in ferns at Duke University, where they're also
a scholar in residence. And we'll talk about their stories and their history and their deep love of ferns in a moment, But first, thank you to everyone who supports the show via Patreon, dot com, slash ologies, where you can join for a dollar a month, and you can leave questions for theologists ahead of time. Thank you to everyone out there in ologies Merch via ologiesmerch dot com.
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Okay, let's jump into terodology. So the pet comes from the Greek word for a wing or a feather, so like pterodactyl or helicopter helico, which means spiral, and pitu, which means wing. So if you didn't know, yeah, the pate in helicopter is its own word in there. It's weird. But ferns they look feathery, so people who study them are officially on record as terodologists. And so let's illuminate the shadowy world of ferns to hear about their long evolution.
What ferns not to have in your house icons to fern scientists, haploid, diploid spot packets, Do they have roots? How ferns can teach us about sexual identity? The most expensive ferns, the tastiest ferns, the trendiest ferns, mathematical mysteries, and a genome that makes no sense to me, at least with the absolutely charming, enthusiastic scholar professor, researcher, fern advocate and pterotologist doctor Fayway Lee Lee him, where are you right now?
Right now in nor Kolena. I'm actually in a process off moving my lab Duke University.
Does North Carolina have good ferns? I feel like I don't even know if North Carolina has burns?
Yeah? I mean North America in January is not a great place to find ferns. The most exciting place in North America to find ferns is in the desert.
What no?
Yeah? Yeah. Arizona, for example, has one of the highest fern diversity.
I thought berns needed a lot of darkness and water, and those arely two things Arizona does not have.
Well, so they have a what we call a calmphoid ferns. They are desert ferns. They adapted to this really dry environment and they really took advantage of it and took off. They diversify so much diversity there.
What do they look like?
Usually they look really crispy. They can lose their water up to ninety percent and I can still come back alive. So if you, for example, have a hike in a desert in Arizona, Texas, whatever it sees on crispy ferns, put them no zibla back, pulls on water over it. They might come back. Just grin it up.
Oh my gosh, does moss do that as well? Can't moss like dehydrate and rehydrate a lot?
Yeah? Yeah, in many ways, they are like mosses. They had resurrection ferns. They looked dead, but then they still can come back.
Well, what a name? What a compelling name? Like zombie coming back from the dead. When I think of a fern, I think of these dark forests, and I think of like deep gullies and streams and wetness and stuff. But what exactly is a fern? Like, they're a plant, but they're not like normal plants, right, not like the plants were used to.
Yeah, I mean there are many ways to define our ferns. You're gonna define it by looking out why they doesn't have They don't have seeds, they don't produce flowers. But the most definitive way to define a fern is their sex life. Let me hear it. Okay, well they don't have flowers, right, and then flowers where the sex happens, the sperm will fertilizes that you have the next generations. Fernds don't have flowers and the funnier friends you see
outside out deploids. They have two set of chromosomes, like flying plants and humans for example, But I have this entirely different generations that we call the gameto pace, and a Gametophytes are haploids.
So diploid two means two copies of a gene and haploid means one copy. Most of your cells are diploid, but game meat cells like sperm and egg are haploid because they're gonna hook up with each other. So ferns have this stage gametophytes, which means like a sexy plant. And it's easy to remember because gammutophytes typically look like little green hearts or sometimes they look like an ovenmit, which I guess is sexy, depending on who wear the
person is wearing the oven mit. But yeah, gamutofytes structures of sexual independence.
And that independent they live outside of the deploy ferns that green. They're usually super tiny, smaller than a new fingernails, for example. And this is where the sex happens in ferns. Nine of flowers by in a gam doovive phase.
And does that come out as the spores that you see that powdery brown stuff on the back.
Of the leave right exactly? So the spores were geminating to gamdovides, and the gamdovides are free living. They will produce egg and sperms and they will fertilized and have become a zygo, and a zygo will become you know, the furny ferns you see outside. So they basically have two independent generations, the haploid phase and the deploy phase.
And is this an older type of reproduction or is it just divergent evolution or is this something that's kind of ancestral.
Only in ferns. You have these two separate generations living independent with each other. And that's why make that unique. That exactly defines a firm.
What is there basic anatomy? Do they have a rhizome or do they have roots? If you had to give the basic parts of a fern.
Okay, so I guess the tax for ferns will have a horizontal rhizome, and the rhizome you can think about it's a stem, and then you have leaf, which is a fern frons coming out, and then beneath it you have the roots, so a chhizome, a stem, roots coming down and the leaf coming out. Okay, that's a basic principle there. And the roots are true roots. They are not like a brow fight roots, which is a rhizoids.
Oh okay, so that's a misconception that they don't have roots.
They have proper vasculatures in their roots system.
Nice.
So yes, ferns have roots, but they also have rhizomes that act like a stem, but they look kind of like a clumpy knob at the base of the fronds. And then below the rhizome you have the actual roots of the plant. Obviously, with over ten thousand species of ferns, we're not going to discuss every fern, but we can get the broad strokes, especially between the massy or bryophyte looking little gametophytes which are tiny and the frond looking adult sporophytes. I love also that you call them mossy
mosses and ferny ferns. Yeah, like to get an idea of like what they look.
Like and the fern gamdo fights where the halflo face they do look in many ways like a bro fights.
And we had a great episode about moss a few years ago, and I'd never considered what their life cycle was like, or how rich and diversity they are, and how you can go up close to one and just see so much that you would overlook unless you had a loop and stuff. But have you always been like a plant person or did you get into this via the spore angle or what what made it so that you are an expert in you're a terdologist.
I'm a yes. Yeah. So I grew up in Taiwan. There's just so many fern diversity in Taiwan. So to put into a perspective, Taiwan has eight hundred fern species. Taiwan is like a third of the third size of New York State. The whole North America has only four hundred species. So this tiny allen has double of fern diversity compared to USA. And so I just really got
really fascinated about the diversity of friends. My parents have a little cabin in the woods, and I spent a lot of time in a forest looking around and just realized there's so many of them and I just wanted to identify them learn more about them. And that's how I've become hooked with ferns.
Did your parents get you plant books and were they? Didn't you come back to the house like all these plants?
They did? Did they give me many field guides? And that's yeah.
I feel like with ferns there is something really beautiful about doing spore pressings and like the preservation. Do you find when you're doing this research? Do you have to go back in archives to see specimens that were collected a long time ago that are pressed How are you even researching and cataloging them?
Yeah, we use herbarium a lot. So herbarier is like a library of debt plants. It's really a magical place. So it's a place you basically have physical plant materials from around the world and from different plant lineages and just go to different cabinets and you can pull them hous can look at them very closely. And so we spend a lot of time in herbarium looking for characters,
trying to identify different species of ferns. We also were able to find some new species just by looking at all herbarian specimens.
No, how do you tell are you able to take a little fragment of it and do any DNA now on it to Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. That's the beauty of herbarians specimens. They preserve so much information that DNA you can get or you can get DNA from specimens as as over one hundred years old specimens. And they have the locality, we know where they come from. They have the spores where you can look at this spar mophology. So yeah, her parent's very important for botanical research. And in the past we've discovered
several new species. So big. Before you discover something new, right, you got a chance to name it and yeah, yeah, yeah. One time we discovers a new genus and my advisor and I decide to name it after Lady Gaga, So the genus is called Gaga.
No, yeah, that's amazing. Was your advisor Lady Gaga ban or did you know that, like this is a good move for ferns.
She's she's a deep lady Gaga fans. The two things we talk about when I was a graduate students her cat and Lady Gaga's newest album.
Did Lady Gaga ever find out about that?
Yes, she was interviewed several times and people asked her of all the Gaga friends and yeah shere acknowledge of this, and the Gaga friends would describe, they have a really odd reproductive methods and they Bipe has a lot of sexual reproductions. And so Lediga made a comments of all the Gaga friends saying they are sexless.
And one of the researchers spearheading this twenty twelve naming was doctor Kathleen Pryor, who was inspired in part by this sequined light sea, foamy green and heart shaped body suit that the pop star had performed in, and also the DNA of this genus of nineteen different ferns has some repeating pairs of Gaga or Gaga, and Doctor Pryor also said that the naming was in honor of Lady Gaga's quote fervent defense of equality and individual expression, and
that they think her second album Born This Way is enormously empowering, especially for disenfranchised people and communities like lgbt ethnic groups, women, and she added scientists who study odd ferns. And while Lady Gaga has identified as bisexual, she's also been quick to note that she doesn't represent the LGBTQ plus community and just speaks up for equity and freedom
of sexual expression. And there were also earlier in her career rumors of her being trans, and her response was usually along the lines of, so what if I were so? Fern commuta fights make male and female sex cells proof that nature is not on a binary and so now you're saying that they have kind of like a sexless reproduction.
But I'm wondering, like, because the spores always get me with ferns, I think that's one of the things that's most interesting when you are like looking at spores, say under a microscope, Do they have a lot of different morphologies that determine what happens in their different like diploid and haploid phases, Or is a spoor is a spor is a spore? Do they all look the same?
Spores contain a lot of informations a specie. Different genera have really different ornamentations. Stems that have pores on the spore walls and those are very important characters, and the size are important too. Many ferns like to become a polyploids, so they duplicalated genomes pretty often, so I have four copies of chromosomes. Many of them even have tall copies of chromosomes. And when they do that, the spores become
very big. So we can measure the spores size as a proxy of how many set of chromosomes they have in a genome.
So to recap those little bumps on the underside of a fern leaf, those are called psi, and each one has little orbs, which in turn has the spores. And when the time is right, the spores pop out like someone from a giant birthday cake, and they find a wet spot to germinate into that gametophyte with little root like rhizoids, and these can make the haploids or eggs. And when a sperm finds an egg through a film of water, then you get the diploid parts of the
life cycle. As the fern leaves begin to sprout and grow, they commutify shrivels up at the base. As that fern plant begins to grow up, the cycle starts again. But yes, chromosomes in ferns, it turns out, can be wild and do people who are researching ferns, such as yourself and your lab, are you going about it from that genomics? Are you in it for the chromosomes and the reproduction cycle or are a lot of terodologists in conservation and
taxonomy of it? What makes a fern person kind of come alive with the research?
Yeah. So in the past where I've down many different aspects of ferm biology, We've downsound taxonomy, we describe species, looking at how those different species relate to each other, and nowadays where we focus a lot on their genomics side. Now, friends, are weird? Does a fern species auphioglossoms retic golottum it has fourteen hundred chromosomes? What so humans have forty six? Right?
What?
And then this guy has fourteen hundred chromosomes and just why why do they do that? And their genomes are huge as well? So you know DNA is composed of atgc right, four different letters, and humans for example have like three billions of different letters.
So most humans have forty six chromosomes twenty three pairs, and each chromosome in humans can have up to three hundred million base pairs, and the base pairs are the rungs of that spiral ladder of DNA, and A pairs with t, C pairs with G. So our genome contains over three billion base pairs of those letters.
But there's a firnt species has one hundred and sixty billion letters, like a lot bigger than human genome. Why right, And that's something I want to figure out. How do I do this?
So unraveling that DNA mystery that's in the future of ferns. But what about tales of ferns past? Were they one of the earlier plants when we see drawings of like dinosaurs surrounded by ferns, is that pretty accurate? Did they predate flowers by a lot like flowering plants?
Well, yes, I know so. So ferns are both really old and also are really young.
Tell me everything you know.
They're old in a sense. You can trace the whole lineage back to company forwards, like three hundred million years ago, and that is the time that ferns really dominated Earth. The coals were burning now are coming from ferns and the engine relatives, so you can think about friends are feeling the civilizations of human beings anyway, So they dominate Earth, and then in Cretaceous, like one hundred million years ago, flying plants come along and they are bad. They are bullies.
They pushed ferns out, so they become the dominant actors of the forest, and the friends have to figure out how to do next. So they went under story, and they kind of staging a comeback when they were under story, and they adapt to the really low line environments and they flourished and they diversify in the lowla environment. And so most of the French species, most of the fur lineage we see today, are actually really young, young, younger than the flying plants.
Oh, because they had to adapt to it exactly.
We call them the diversifying the shadow of angelsperms in the shadow of flying plants. Wow, yeah, they're young.
I had no idea. I always thought that they had been around forever and it must have just been darker than which is not right.
You are wrong.
So ferns themselves have been on Earth for four hundred million years, but they have adapted to temperature fluctuations and they've kind of rebranded as understory low light champions in some case is once the angiosperms or the flowering plants came in and ruined their whole vibe. Do you get a chance to go back to Taiwan and are you just like ferns, ferns, ferns, ferns. Do you go back and you're just like, ah, finally, so good ass ferns.
Yeah? Every time, that number of species just blew me away again and again. Walking though little trial, you see a hundred of species. It's fantastic. One thing I miss a lot in Taiwan is the food. And you can find feto hats in Taiwan and then people cook it and it's pretty common and they're really really delicious.
What's the best way to eat a fiddlehead?
Okay, I guess I need to clarify. So not all fetoheads are edible. Okay, some are all right, toxic and cosinogenic. In eastern US, you will in the spring, you will go on and pick feto hats, right, So just makes that you pick the right ones, don't pick the toxic one. But the feto has we eat in the US, for example, or is the species Commatsusia throphiopters. The common name is ostrich ferns and the best way to cook it, I
think it is. First thing, you branch them. They're very tanning, a lot of tanning, and you want to get rid of them. And then I will ass some butter, some fido has, some shrimps, some pasta together, make it up. It's good. It's crounchy but also a bit slimy. So it's like really interesting balance that I really.
Like, kind of like okra, like a little bit. Have you ever had okra?
Okra is too slimy, but I think, yeah, like the crounchy bit is better.
Do a lot of animals go out lunching on fiddleheads. Who eats ferns? In terms of like evolution.
Ferns are famous for not being eaten really, so I mentioned some vito hads. Some ferns are toxic, right, and they are toxic for reasons they don't want to be eaten. Friends are also very famous for having very little herbivalry.
What does that mean?
Don't get eaten? Very little insects eat them?
Oh okay, So if you if you.
Go out right again, go on a hike, look at all the fern fronts. They're usually intact. If you look at the flying plants. Someone's got chewed up pretty badly, and so the comparisons, the contrast pretty striking. And the really cool thing about this is you can take advantage of this. So there's a big c company called Koteva. They produce a lot of coins and solbans in the US, and they got really interesting in ferns because they realize no one eat ferns, but why right, And so they
develop very sophisticated screening pipelines. So they're able to identify a number of insect cydal proteins from ferns and they were able to put us in corns and that the new generation of corn is super resistant to a lot of like foam army worms and so on, so probafully in a future, maybe the corns you are eating has a bit of fern DNA in.
Like kind of TransGeneration. Yeah, kind of, So you're eating a little bit of fern dna. Which then does that mean that they can use fewer insecticides exactly and pesticides on it?
That's that's the whole point. Wow.
I mean, you'd think ferns have so many genes to spare, you know, they have so many for some of them, they're like, take a couple, We're fine. You guys have forty, We're fine. Yeah. What about when it comes to ferns in the media, Fern Goalie Land before time. Have you seen either of these? Do you ever notice ferns in like animation and you go that fern wouldn't be there, To.
Be honest, I've heard about those movies whenever watching them The Girl in.
The US, right, So yeah, but.
Between two ferns, that's I guess that's the one I know.
Of between two ferns.
I'm your host, Keanu Reep, I'm your host sach alpha Acus, and my guest today is Keanu Reeves.
Thank you for being here, Thanks for having me here.
On a scale of one two, one hundred, how many words do you know one to one hundred?
But do you know fifty words?
Do you know seventy five words?
Funny as hell? So the ferns in between two ferns, by the two friends that said to be on the size, they are the Philippus cordifolia. So it's the comming now of it is Boston ferns, or sometimes called the sword ferns and Boston friends are kind of they are the most widely cultivated friends in the entire world. It's so popular.
And the origins of Boston ferns it is a bit unclear, but it was hypothesized that there was a shipment of ferns from Europe in the late late nineteenth centuries, and that shutments contains a lot of really weird variety of Boston ferns and sometimes droopy. Some of them are highly dissected. Some of the crested and florests picked them up, and I guess the new house sensation was born. And in the early twentieth century there was a rapport saying Boston ferns.
There's over a million Boston friends being sold and grown. It's just the eastern side of us alone. So that was extremely popular ferns back then. I guess it's still pretty popular now.
Are they hard to take care of?
I mean, yeah, maybe perhaps not so I started friends by killing them. Okay, I cannot grow furnishing the house. My wife used to just couldn't understand why a friend doctor keep killing her ferns.
You're not uncomfortable with dead plants, obviously, because you're around all a lot. So there you go. It's like you understand the value of a dead plant. Also, a lot of people see a dead plant and they say, oh, no, this is a tragedy. But you say, this is an opportunity to catalog it.
It just if I'm good at it, I could have made a lot of money. So I don't know if you've seen the stackhorn ferns.
So they're called staghorn ferns because they look kind of lowby, like reindeer antlers or a very large frize salad. And colonies of staghorn ferns in the wild can divide labor, with the upper fronds getting waxy and directing rainwater downward to spongy or staghorns below it, but not in the wild. Staghorns are the buzz of the plant world. There is a Better Home and Gardens article from August and it got except that it's hard to find a plant as
controversial as the staghorn fern, it continued. While some adore its sculptural antler like Franz, others shy away from its prehistoric aesthetic. A recent glimpse into the terrace of Martha Stewart revealed a hanging staghorn fern as the ultimate natural statement piece center stage. So staghorns the fern.
De jure, it's getting really parblay in Asia. So they usually are mounted on the on the wooden plaque and they have the angela shaped leaf coming out, so really like a deer mounted on the wall. I guess in Etsy you can get them for like twenty bucks. But recently in Taiwan there was a new variety of stackhorn ferns that was sold over three hundred thousand US dollars. Ah No, So there's a total staghorn firm craze fever
in some part of Asian countries right now. So if I'm good at this, yeah, I mean I can make serious money, you.
Can retire early. But I just volunteer at the lab. Just do it for the love of ferns. But just like from a yacht, are ferns getting kind of a comeback or are there people who are just like die hard, Like I'm a fern person and not an angio sporophile. Do ferends have their like street team that loves them?
Yeah? So there's an American Friends Society and I'm currently the president elect of that society. It's so fun to be around with firm people. I mean in a potannical world. Wait, the firm people have the reputations of being really realthy and just like all stick to each other.
That's so cool. I mean, you know, I almost named our dog Fern. I love the name Fern. Have you ever met anyone who's named fern? Is that a great name?
It was, yeah, I I mean, we have a daughter, and then I'll proposed to my wife maybe we should admit them her ferns. But because I also been killing a lot of ferns in the house, so she doesn't there it's a it's a good idea.
She's like, we'll name her Maggie. We'll never anything anything Daisy somebody.
Yeah, something cannot be killed.
What about you know? Speaking of dead ferns, like, how are they doing out there?
Yeah, it's a serious issues. There are a lot of endangered friend species. To give you an example, there's some Halloween just passed. But if you walk around southern Florida and you'll be very lucky to see a spooky green hands coming out from a palm trees, and those are like Carol glassa palmato. It's a very dangerous fern species in Florida and it looks just like a hands dangling down super cool. It's one of the reasons they got so dangerous because over collections, because it looks so weird,
people want to collect them and then grow them. It just doesn't grow well outside of the native habitats. And obviously the theseconstructions of the swamps, the dranage of swamps also did Was it dinner help?
Is there a way to try to cultivate those and reintroduce them or is that just really really hard to do?
There are some progress. So in upside New York there's a very dangerous species go Asplanium scoopandrium. And this is a very common, commercially available fern species, but those are coming from Europe. So Europe have a different subspecies, and an American subspecies is extremely endangered. But anyway, there's been some process of reintroducing the native American ones to the habitat.
And one twenty seventeen thesis I read, titled Experimental reintroduction of American hearts tongue fern Factors affecting successful establishment of transplants noted that the reintroduction success varied based on partly how robust and the little ferns were at the time of transplantation, and in the higher humidity sites they tended
to fare better. And I looked up a twenty twenty five paper and it seemed to find that while still threatened in their native Northeast habitats, the transplant efforts have been working. So hooray for combating issues that we have caused. Obviously, every year ecology changes more and more, and it's interesting to think how much you know one type of plant can tell you about what's going on in the environment,
you know, as a whole. And we have questions from listeners, can I ask you, yeah, yeah, okay, they have great questions, better than mine. And we will get to your questions patrons in a moment, but first, let's donate to a cause of the ologists choosing in this week. It's going to the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, which promotes research and teaching of taxonomy, systematics, and phylogeny of vascular and
non vascular plants. And they provide early career bipock research grant funds, graduate student research grant funds, and more plus more resources, and it's a pleasure to support them on behalf of Doctor Lee and on behalf of Ferns the World Over, and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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Okay, if you would like to ask a question of the ologist before we record, you can hop on over to patrion dot com slash ologies where you can join for as little as one dollar a month. And let's enter the overgrown forest of your questions. And let's see on the topic of cultivation, we were just talking about that goal next door Ashley doing Empress of small Wood and Mish the Fish wanted to know. Gooal next door said, I've tried to collect spores and grow them to absolutely
no avail. Is this a losing battle or is it a skill issue? How can I grow myself a fern forest? And the Empress of small Wood want to know. Can you collect ferns spores to germinate more spores, more ferns. Someone else asked what they could do to prevent their native ferns from spreading through the rest of the garden. But that I imagine just like you gotta pluck them. The father of Mish the Fish looking at you and your ferns. If you want a fern goalie, can you try to make one.
Yeah, and so to germany of the spores, you really want them to be on the really west surface, so it can you use a dow the contenter with some pe moss maybe and some really moist soil, and then you can sprinkle the ferns on top of them, keep the lid on so it's the whole environment is really humid, and hopefully that can get you some little fern gamo FTEs, so you'll see the fern gam to fight first. So those are like mossy things coming out from the grounds.
They would not look like a fernce in the beginning. Ah, you'd be looking at like really filmy green sheets on the soil. But some friends have green spores, like the matusias, the ostrich ferns, they have green spores, which means that they have really bad shelf life. So if you want to collect the sports, you better germinate them right away. Just don't put them in their room temperature for too long. They will go bad.
So do you kind of have to figure out which species you've got and then learn what works best for that species? Is it very a little bit?
Definitely?
Yeah? Okay, yeah, yeah, Well on the topic of those, give me to FTEs Hi.
This is Tommy and.
Mackel Wrath.
We want to know why ferns have done so well and lasted so long evolutionarily over the years.
This is We're from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and many more of you, including Jenny You, Maddy, a good soup moth, Katie Muno's Brandahl scale, bar Amy Rugula, Clemens v Redhead scientist and Matchmidt from Wellington, New Zealand wanted to know what or how gametophytes give ferns a leg up in sexual reproduction. Thanks, what is it about them that has led to their survival?
That's a great question. So fern spores can fly away really far. It can fly really far away, right, And then imagine you are a single spore just by yourself, and you landed in a remote islands and there's no one else there, and a spore with chimney into a gamto fights, and a gameto fights are typically hermaphroditic, so they have both male and female parts. So you can just self fertilize yourself and you become a new ferns.
You don't need a nod pont in it, because a single sport can colonize the whole island, and that in a sense gives them a like help.
Is there an issue then with whatever that reproduces, reproducing like with itself, does it become kind of cloned or is there like an issue with genetics?
Oh? Yeah, it creates a lot of issues. Okay, because you're self fertilized, where you lose all the genetic diversity that way, the hedrozygosity that way, so you are completely homozygous. There's no diversity in your genome. Every single locus they are SAMD.
So imagine an unrelated egg meets a stranger's fern sperm, and you've got a lot of variation, a lot of combos happening because they're heterozygous, they're different. Now, if you're mixing with your own DNA homozygous, you might have some weak spots where your haploid communified DNA is doubling up with itself in the diploid phase. Also, good job for knowing what all those terms means. Look at how far we've come.
So that's problematic in a long run. But if you want to just colonize somewhere really fast, you got it.
Gets the job done. Yeah, and Matt Schmidt was from New Zealand. Have you been to New Zealand? No, me neither.
It's a great place to look at ferns. They have so many cool friends in New Zealand's.
That's what's my next question. Andy Pepper, Zizz, Sarah Man's, Fiona Roggi, Addie Cappello, all these people asked about New Zealand and ferns. Ziz said, I'm so excited, omg as a Kiwi, why do New Zealand forests have so much silver fern when I've never even heard of tree ferns anywhere else. Sarah said, please talk about New Zealand ferns.
And then also Addie Cappello wanted to know culture wise, like they've spent time in New Zealand and says that there's a lot of ferns integrated into the culture there and so what is it about New Zealand Why is their fern game? I'm so strong.
I wish I'll work in New Zealand's as a firm biologist. You know Soler friends right, it's everywhere. It's only the national The New Zealand has fronds on them. The Rocky Bik teams have the firm leave on the Jersey. It's amazing.
And according to the Museum of New Zealand, yes, ferns are a big deal. They're on military tombstones, they're on sports uniforms, coats of arms, currency, and though I have never been to New Zealand, I imagine they're everywhere in like cool murals and bus stops and clip art and everything.
Now of particular acclaim are the black fern and the silver fern, the latter called pongo to Maori folks, which is native only to New Zealand and which can grow into this hairy kind of scaly tree trunk several stories tall. And New Zealand it's just lousy with ferns. Ferns everywhere in the best way. Does New Zealand just have like great habitat for ferns.
Yes, And also they have really odd ferns, I guess probably because it was isolated a bit on the rest of the world. Some weird ferns, you know, really appear as in that place.
And so kind of like what you were saying with a spore lands on an island turns into a commutiphy then they can just colonize. They can just boom. So if they're in this sort of remote location, then you might just get all kinds of evolution from that.
Yeah, exactly, the kind of adapt to the via specific habitats. And PEF's interesting myphology.
What about invasive ones? Reese Parini justin Bowen, I'll be listening, Lisa Gorman Potato Puffer and Earl of Gramblecan wanted to know in Reese's words, are there invasive ferns? And I know we mentioned earlier that that person's dad was like, how do I get rid of some of the native ferns? Take it over my garden because they're so good at that reproduction? Are there ever? Like, whoa, we got too many of this fern here?
There are several really nasty ferns. So there's one species called like Goldia microphyllum is native in Asia, but Florida is cling forest. Man, this is weird ferens. So it's a climbing ferns. So they wrap around trees and they go up and a single leaf, the whole thing is a single leaf. So they have the longest leaf on these planet because that whole thing is a single leaf, and they go up the trees and they strangle the trees.
Oh, each front of this old world climbing fern, which can smother whatever was growing underneath. Its canopy can be one hundred and twenty five feet long. South Florida hates these things.
So yeah, it's a it's a horrible hobo ferns. But in the native habitats they are well behaved, just for some reasons. Oh they arrive Florida in one while bright So that's one. There's another friend species called Salvena molasta i guess as an um, implying molossa. It's a not a not a good ferns, just aquatic ferns that floats on top of water. It's native in Brazil and it has caused billions of dollars of damage around the world
in Australia and Africa. It just blocked the waterways. It can just cover the entire lake and then choke whatever is fish down there. It's a serious problem. Some ferns are not nice.
Some ferns are like, that's it taken over. There's my tree now, Florida. Florida has some issues with pythons and all kinds of stuff. It's wild down there. Florida's just its own science experiment in terms of what's going on down there.
Well, but there are some weedy ferns that kind of maybe can save the Earth a bit. So this a fern called azola. It's also aquatic ferns. They float around. Fifty million years ago, you know, Earth was a much warmer place and the Arctic was actually a big freshwater lake and there was a huge Azola bloom during that time.
And with the geologists estimated that during that Azola bloom, that fern bloom in the Arctic water they see crashed over one trillion tons of carbon dig side and that was hypothesized to facilitate the earth transition from that warmer climates to a now cooler environments. Right now the Arctic is frozen mostly for now. So yeah, they they have played big roles, their weediness have played big roles in earth geological history.
You mentioned something about the fern that can climb trees and tree climbing ferns and a bunch of people Cynthia b Ellis Sugarman, Earl of Gramulican Mad's first time question asker Jmo and Cynthia Ze Cynthia's see all caps, all caps, three exclamation points. Please tell me more about ant ferns. I fell in love instantly with Lecinopteris genus mecanopteras. Yeah, currently grow a few species. How did they co evolve with ants? Can they substitute the role of ants with fertilizer?
Do they host bugs other than ants? Mads wanted to know. Do ferns have a symbiotic relationship with other animals or plants? So you know we're talking about some ferns live on trees as semions others working with ant alliances. What's going on? First? Let's talk about ant ferns because I have no idea what Cynthisia is talking about.
Yeah, so like anopster is that the mentions have a really interesting rhizome structures. So usually rhizome is really like a thing like a pencil right on the only grounds running on trees. Well, a rhizome of n ferns like anopters, it's like a maze is like a balloon and has chambers. They have different places and the ants will live inside the rhizomes. And so ferns are providing a really comfy place for ants to live, and the ants job is
to protect the ferns. So if there's any aphists some other insects want to eat the ferns, the ants will fight them off. So it's some of some milder interactions. And the cool thing about this is this evolved multiple times in ferns evolutionary histories. Another fern genus called Solinopteris so Solnopterrius solenium. The rhizome like a tomato size like a tomato, and again similar things. The ants will chew into the big rhizome and they live inside the rhizomes again for protections.
That's so cool that it's like a condo.
Yeah, exactly. And some ferns have nectar, so they have either a very specialized nectary structures or sometimes just sequete really sugar liquids. Again, they enticing ends to come over. I'm hoping they will be their bodyguard. I need you here.
And then in terms of other plants that they like to live with, do climbing ferns benefit some trees? Are there other plants that like to grow near ferns because they do a certain thing to the soil or do they do? Ferns have friends?
I guess, oh, yeah, they have friends. So in the neotropics. Right in Central America or South America, you have bromliads, the big pineapple things on the trees, right, the pineapple things they kind of like upside down cats, and they will collect a lot of leaders. So those are in the neotropics. In in Asian tropics you have the burn nest ferns. They look kind of similar. They have big leaves and they're overlapping leafs, so they collect a lot
of leaf leaders on the trees. And because of that, some frogs like to live on those, specifically on those ferns, and a lot of insects like to live in the habitat. Orchids also like to hanging down from those burnes ferns. And the Azola friends I mentioned right, the one that cool on Earth, they have a very specific centobacteria that live inside of them, so the sanabacter the philosymphatic center bacteria.
They can fix nitrogens, meaning they can turn national gas into ammonia, and only a few bacteria can do that. And essentially Azola ferns have their own fertilizers, so they carry their symbiotics bacteria with them. They can live in a really low nirogen environment and the Asian farmers have
figured out how to use this. So before they plant the rice, they will floods the rice patties and they will put a zoo and the zula will grow and they will fix nitrogen fulia symbotics and it bacteria, and they will drain the water and azula will come down to the soil and it will decompose release all the fixed nitrogens and then they'll plan the rice.
Ah.
So this is a very clever way to boost their productivity.
It's like its own plant fertilizer. Thanks for that. It's like miracle grow or something. But for bigger scale, what about size? Like Mouse Paxton, Marissa Jacobsen, Rhese Parini, Ranger France, Jenna Congdon, Lunar Crumpet, Sustainable Cirenian, Amelia Dhaff Jamie b All these people wanted to know about giant ferns. Amelia Dahoff said, are giant ferns a newer development than the rest of our fern species? Are they an og when it comes to size? Like? What's up with giant ones?
The biggest one I think would be the tree ferns. Oh, okay, the silver ferns in New Zealand those are tree ferns. They have tree fern forests, which is awesome. And the trunk of those tree ferns they don't have woods, so they don't produce any woods at all. The thing you see on the trunk is actually roots. So imagine a fern growing up and when they're growing up, the atpax will actually shoot down roots from the top and the roots will serve as a support structures. And that's how
the tree trunk is made. In tree ferns, it's mostly just roots. Oh wow, the stemmy self is not actually very big, and those roots are really strong roots. They's just now the wimpy roots you see. They are really reinforced roots with lots of fibers in them.
What about let's see fractal pattern m Rothamel, Paulina Tar, Kayleie Bell, Claire Isshy. Wanted to know Claire says fern math, Fibonacci sequence, Barnsley fern. Why are these plants so mathematical? And yeah, why do you fern? And wanted to know embody fractal patterns, what's going on there?
Gosh, this is a question I don't know how to answer. There was a paper exactly about this. It's a paper by Sandy Hefflerington from Enninbo. They have a beautiful paper about the mathematics in math and fossil.
Ferns, and for more on this you can see the twenty twenty five paper Identification of a tetrahedral appical cell preserved within a fossilized fern fiddle head, where doctors Raphael Cruz and Sandy Heatherington looked at a three hundred and fifteen million year old fern fossil and they concluded that fiddleheads have been around for a long time and that fern leaves evolved through the modification of shoots, and the spirals in nature may have evolved simply because it's a
very efficient packing method, So think about that next time you organize your sock drawer. Also, if you're a fractiphile and you can't get enough of the seemingly infinite repeating patterns of fern leaves, I would like to direct you to the nineteen eighty eight book Fractals Everywhere by a mathematician named Michael Barnsley, who has a fractal named after him, and it's also named after a fern. It's the Barnsley fern fractal, and models of it look like a fern leaf.
But if you're a terodologist, you would say best resembles a black spleenwort naturally. Also, I know that approximately all percent of you are listening just waiting to find out why your fern is dead, maybe your doctor Lee's wife. So me, not being a terodologist or even an owner of a single fern, did spend some time asking the Internet why you suck at ferns, and I gathered the following tips. So, ferns like humidity, so keep them in a bathroom with a window, but not in a bathroom
without a window. They need to be somewhere with light. They don't actually grow well in basements, but not too sunny or you might scorch them. So if you have a south or a westward facing windows, set them back a few feet from it missed them. Water them when the soil is dry. You might have stick your finger in there like every day to check. But water from the roots and not the crown. And also, if your
fern is brown and brittle, you probably underwatered it. And if your fern just fucking sucks and it's shedding leaves and you can't keep it alive. It might be a Boston fern, which some fern enthusiasts seem to hate because they are cheap, they are abundant, and they are an easy thing to kill. So everyone thinks all ferns are bad houseplants, but it may just be that they got
a bad Boston. Also, we have an amazing Domestic Pathophytology episode with Tyler Thrasher about why your houseplants are dead and how to keep them alive, and I suggest you have a listen. It's great. Tyler is very passionate about your houseplants and judgmental, but it's good. Okay, moving onward. This is a very very technical, scholastic question. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to answer it. Coca wants to know. I really want a fern tattoo.
Does theologists have one? It's actually not a hard question. Wants to know if you have a fern tattoo.
I do not have a friend tattoo.
If you had to get a fern tattoo, if they were like, listen, if you want to fund your lab, you have to go get a fern tattoo, right, now or your lab is going to close. Dout what fern would you get a tattoo of?
I will get a Lady Gaga front tattoo, and then maybe I want to show way to Lady Gaga saying please.
Fund my lab. Good gosh, Stephanie, fund the lab. Okay, So no fern tattoos. Do any of your grad students or post docs anyone have fern tattoos?
Oh?
Yeah, yeah they do.
There would show off their friend tattoos. Yeah, lift their shut saying hey see what I got. But I mean, if you want to get a temporary one, there's a cool way to do it. So earlier I mentioned there some ferns live in the desert, right, and one adaptations they have is they produce a lot of foreigner So those are little white color or yellow colored powders on
the leave. So if you find a nice ferns in the desert and then flip it over it and you see it's bright yellow, bright white, pick it up, and then you can put on your pants, put on our shorts in and smash it. And then they will leave the impressions of that farina on your shirts or pants, and this beautiful, beautiful.
And it's temporary, and it's free.
It's temporary. Yeah, just don't do it in a national park.
Yeah, okay, don't do it a national park and maybe draw ferns. You could always draw ferns too. You could take a sharpie and draw fern on you see how you like it?
Yeah?
What about Matt's and cast the dog nerd row and tree, Danny C? Murder Burder, so many people Ella raptor Sustainable, Cibernian, I want to know if you have a favorite fern. Danny C wants to know what's the prettiest fern in your opinion. I know this is really putting you on the spot because there's so many ferns that are gonna be like, oh, really interesting, But do you have a favorite fern that you just are like close to your heart?
I cannot answer that question. It's like was your favorite sheld? Kind of questions.
No, no, they're all good. Okay, what about smell again, Addie Cappello Matt Mesnick first question asker Brenna Hall wanted to know. Brenna said, why do ferns have that incredible fern smell? And Matt Mesnick's wife said, why do you crush up ferns smell so delicious.
Okay, so the first question is, I don't know how kind of knows this prison house but never to get the fern smell. Recently got a kenneth apology that has a label as a fern. But now look at an ingredient has no ferning it and it doesn't smell like a I don't know. But then the crossed ferns. Yes, So there's a species called hay sended ferns and it's famous for you know, you across it and the cross on leaves you have the hay scenter smell. But that's
very specific for this fern species. Some ferns they are sweet, so if you want to taste it. There's a species called Polypodium glaci riizon. So glacs rihizo means sugar rhizome and it has like licorice taste to it. In a flour of North America. If you look at the keys how to identify the species, there's a few notes about different species would taste different, so you have to chew the raizmes and then remember the taste, and then that's how you identify the species.
It's kind of like when geologists are out there licking rocks a little bit. You know, have geologists like relate rocks to be like this one's salty, but definitely make sure that you know what you're munching on before, right.
Yeah?
What about touch response? Jessica Dube Manatee Lover and Freddie and Eli want to know what makes certain ferns react so quickly? How come not all of them can? But Jessica Dubey asked, what causes some of them to close up when they're touched?
Okay, so they are not ferns. It's a ligum plans. So here you go.
There you go, mistaken identity?
Right, Well, that they do have that factory dissector leaves, so I guess, yeah.
Is that What is the name of that leaf structure? Is it pinnate or es?
Yes?
Okay. One person wanted to know. Laurel said, how do I become ferns after I die? Especially if they're surrounded by big moss and trees? Like if you wanted to die and then come a bunch of ferns? Is there a place where you should ask for your body to be deposited? Do you go and go? You know what I mean? Go to New Zealand, New Zealand. Yeah, just die in New Zealand. Yeah, okay, New Zealand. There you go, So get a passport to New Zealand. Walk into the
woods when it's your time. But not before. Alyssa wanted to know because I know that your parents were like amazing and got you field guides. Alyssa Diodado wants to know if you have any favorite field guides or fern books. Has anyone just like absolutely knocked it out of the park with a fern book. This is a trick question.
One.
Well, there you go, like mine, Wow, that's naous.
It's right here if you want to.
See, Yes, there you go. Okay, get your book. The book is called Ferns Lessons in Survival from Earth's Most Adaptable Plants, and it has chapters on ferns, on Trees, Ferns as Trees, Desert Ferns, Ferns and Animals, Humans and Ferns, the Past and the Future of ferns. And it is just an elegant and gorgeously illustrated book. It belongs on your coffee table or under a holiday tree. We'll link it in the show notes. Top shelf fer and book also, but.
In terms of field guide, there was a new one by Emily sess Off on you a Potechnical Garden, and that's a beautiful friend guide. You should you should get h.
Does zach Eliphanachus know of your work?
No?
No, no, I think someone needs to tell him.
I know his work, I know his work. He doesn't know my.
You need to get him a copy of your book. Yeah, if he doesn't have it, Yeah, I want him to sit between two copies of your Fern.
Book and I interview lated Gaga.
Yes, an intermulated god out. You can be on set as a consultant.
I mean, the federal funding is going away and we all need money to do research. Yeah, so whatever it takes, man, whatever.
It takes, whatever it takes, we'll send it up the chain. Or like if anyone listening to this, no sex, Helpanacus and or.
Lady guys, please please research.
Well that you know the last questions I always ask her what is the hardest part of your about your job? And right now federal funding is in the toilet and things are in absolutely bonkers. We got climate change. Uh, what's the hardest part about what you do or what's gotten harder or what is there something that's just annoying.
I think funding is has been more and more difficult. We spend a lot of time writing proposals and sometimes we got it's really good feedback finding sf us Dade those federal agencies, and they they just don't have enough money to fund all the good research projects. And you know, some frind research can really change things. Right, the insect sidal things I mentioned earlier right as has actual practical translations into agriculture. Some people are studying symbolysis with center
back to our. How if we can engineer symbolysis of center back to our with some corn plants maybe or rice plants, that will also change how we do our agriculture. So a lot of this have real translations to to real world. And also friend diversity is going away because all the things you mentioned we do really need to understand their diversity before they disappeared. And those kind of research is really hard to get funding. So they gaga, if you are listening, help us out.
What about the best thing? What do you love like? What keeps you going?
So I guess the discovery I also working with people as a really awesome lab and It's really fun talking to them. I think what makes science great is the people. It's great to nerd out together.
And I love that fern people are rowdy and stick together. That's so great. And there's gonna be people listening to this who are like, I'm a fern person and I never knew that there were other fern people out there that.
I can well join. American Friends Society.
Oh my god, get your book. This is amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. This is just one of my favorites. I think your book should be a holiday gift for anyone who likes to playing. Thank you, get the book. So ask fantastic people for reals, not smart questions, because they may have the same questions on their mind. And please grab a copy of doctor Lee's book, Fern's Lessons in Survival from Earth Most Adaptable Plants, which we will link in the show notes for you, alongside
more of his research. We have a ton more links up at aliboard dot com slash ologies slash territology. We're at ologies on Instagram a Blue Sky, I'm at ali Ward on both we have shorter kid friendly episodes of ologies called smologies SMO l O g i E s available wherever you get podcasts. They're in their own separate feed. You can subscribe to and Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch dot com, and you can join our Patreon for a dollar at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies. Aaron Talbert admins
the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly arndwired as a website. Noel Dilworth keeps us evolving through time as scheduling producer Managing director. Susan Hale is the fractal path that moves us forward. Jake Chafey edits our massive genome of audio alongside lead editor and always nature adjacent Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn unfurled
the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I will tell you a secret from my sometimes a shamed brain this week. It's that I was away for our Ologies live show in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago, and then I went straight to Lisbon. I left the country for six days for a friend's wedding and it was wonderful, and then I came back it was Thanksgiving. My point is my inbox is a mess.
It's so bad. It's just a tangled understory of branches and dead stuff and leaf litter and pythons and strangling vines. I have so many emails to return. It's just frightening. Honestly, word, you're playing with fire here, So if I owe you an email, I swear today's the day. Also, I have never seen The Ferngully, which everyone wants to know about, everyone has questions about. It's the nineteen ninety two animated classic. Your friend Wikipedia just told me that it was Robin
williams first animated film ever, and that quote. Williams provided fourteen hours of improvised lines for the part, which had been originally conceived as an eight minute row. Fourteen hours of improv I can't even imagine the vibe in the room fourteen hours, and I can't return an email. Okay, I'm a Faber pacidermatology, homeology or do zoology, lithology, zoology, meteorology, paratology, ephology, ceiology, seminology, killed ferne get value.
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