Speaker 1: All right, welcome to another episode of the Crime PAGs,
but Bodany doesn't podcast. Today, I have a guest who
studies a really weird and cool and obscure lineage of
plants that not many people are familiar with. So Jeff
Benk everybody, Hello, Hello Jeff, how you doing. Let's talk
about lycophytes.
Speaker 2: Hi joy, Great to be on the great to be
on the podcast. Thanks for biting me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, yeah, well you know you're you're a specialist.
And then a really really cool lineage that uh yeah, man,
that I'm that I'm always seeing when I'm out in
the desert, like selaginella, the spike moss is, don't They're
fucking so weird and so cool. They're all you know
whenever you see them. Most of the time in the desert.
They're dry because the desert's dry most of the time.
But then after they get wet, they come back to life.
The quote unquote resurrection plant uh selaganella lepidophla that we
get out here in West Texas. You know, you'll see
huge mats of it, of individual rosette plants coating the
limestone rock, and you know, they're all dry and crispy,
and then they get wet, and I think, what within
like thirty minutes or an hour they come back to
life and just regreen and start photosynthesizing and metabolizing again
or what.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much, they kind of go into a bit
of a cryptobiotic state, so they basically just shut down
a lot of their functions and basically preserve their organelles
and their cells when they dry out, so they pretty
much nearly fully desiccate, but they're basically making sure they
preserve their functions their cells so they can reboot when
they're rehydrated. It's absolutely fascinating, and there's tons of research
going into just how this happens sort of on a
cellular to basically a microscopic level, because there's I think
there's a lot of interest in trying to translate these
sorts of traits into agricultural crops, for trying to figure
out how people can produce food in places where it
gets really water is a short edge, right, so there's
quite a hot area for research right now.
Speaker 1: I mean, to dry out without dying and just kind
of go dormant and hang in there, you know, like
a lichen wood is insane but it's this is not
the only Well. First off, let's talk about these other
the more xeric adapted, the drought adapted ones. The Silaganella
leptofla is you know, a beautiful rosette, you get Celaganella
gypsy cola down a nuevo laone, which is kind of
specialized to gypsum, has a different leaf shape. But then
you get all these other weird ones, like there's one
in Baja that looks like when you see it and
it's dry, it's in that you know, Baja Chaparral, northern
Baja California, it just looks like someone threw out, like
someone illegally dumped like a dirty, decaying shag carpeting. It's
just all gray and it's just but it coats the ground.
I mean, it's acting like a living mulch. And then
when it gets wet, it comes back to life and
starts photosynthesizing again. You've got Silaganella arizonica, which is another
one that you'll see just draped over rocks, you know,
And a lot of these are really important for the
germination of other plants like cacti and some shrubs, and
you know, they just formed this whole plant community that
it's fucking wild. I remember being in Guanajuato and looking
at Mammalaria Andersoniana, this rare mammalaria, and it was, you know,
so many of them were nestled in beds of Silaganella.
I think it was a sartori but it's just a
fucking cool ise. So you've got that, you've got the
drought tolerant ones, the desiccation tolerant ones, but then you've
got this whole lineage that's evolved for the shady, super
wet jungle rainforest, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Right, absolutely, Yeah, So the vast majority of a lot
of these Selaginella as a genus of Lycophytes or in
that group, vast majority of them are in these rainforest
understories throughout the tropics, and they've I mean, they they've
diversified into so many species. I mean, they're one of
the most species rich genera of seed free plants in
the world. You know, if not the uh there's there's
hundreds and hundreds of species of Slagnella's out there, and
they're obscure as heck. I mean, they're really being able
to determine which species you're dealing with for many of
these these shade living lineages really requires you know, almost
a lot of training and a lot of looking under
the microscope for these minute traits on these leaves of
plants that might look very similar over time. So it's
it's it's fascinating, and that sort of evolution of those
sort of xeric dry adapted slaganellas has really occurred many
times over the span of hundreds of millions of years
that these plants have been around. They diverged from many
of these other lycophytes, you know back well, you know,
hell over three hundred and sixty million years ago we're
talking probably you know, very early on in the evolution
of terrestrial ecosystems that you had these what we call
heterosporus or two types of spore groups of these plants
just splitting off from all the others.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, let's really quick. Let's let's let's fill people
in on what we're talking These are, So these are lycophytes,
that's a monophyletic clade consisting of the lycopods and the
Selejianella and the isoetes, the the what's the kind of
the quill wars, right, so there's like three main groups here,
and but a lycophyte they reproduced by spores. But they're
not really a ferm, they're not really a moss. They're
their own evolutionary lineage, their own group on the terrestrial
plant family tree. You know, what is it, Lepidodendron common
in museums, you know that have like a Natural History
museum's lepidodendron. The scale bark trees are a common fossil
you'll see there. You know, I'm there's a one for
one in the Field Museum that you know, I want.
I wanted my room when I was a kid to
be done up, and you know, they got like a
whole diorama and shit, it's like the lipidods. I mean,
these were some of the largest their modern relatives is
some of the first large growing terrestrial plants that ever
grace the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They were among the first formers of forests. They were
in certainly in the first forests back you know, in
the Devonian period had lycophytes as part of the canopy.
Some of these what we call lycopods. And what's wild
is that there's thought that there's different lineages of these
lycopods that evolved into trees, So most of those tree
like ones back in the Paleozoic era that make up
a huge portion of the world's coal today and altered
the climate when they were growing by sucking up some
CO two out of the atmosphere and de positive it
these equatorial coal swamps. They're now still altering our climate
through their fossilized dead remains into our atmosphere, which is
just absolutely profound that there's like these plant lineages that
do this over and over again in different almost reincarnations
of like this sort of primal primal issue. I mean,
lycopods nearly destroyed the world about three hundred and sixty
million years ago by plunging it into a total possible
snowball Earth that would have been but thankfully that didn't happen.
I mean, there was volcanism still going on.
Speaker 1: It was just such a rapid drying and such a rapid,
such a rapid sequestration of CO two. It just it
holds so much CO two so quickly, could you know, yeah,
in terms of geologic time comparatively speaking, that it it
just it was like an anti greenhouse effect. It just
really I mean it was that it was that big
it almost caused an extinction.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and then you know today they there, their
remains are coming back and they're destroying the world in
the opposite way now by cooking us. So it's like this,
it's it's this really weird thing. Just solar energy that
has been captured in the Earth is being unleashed again
in a different manifestation. So, like, I think that's sort
of dynamic about this. This bizarre group of plants has
always drawn my just my research toward them is that
there's just they had they've had such a profound impact
on our planet, and yet they're so obscure, and you know,
unless you're like actually walking out in habitats and arid lands,
as you were saying, where you see them and how
prominent they are ecologically and these amazing habitats, they're not
the sort of thing that you think about most of
the time walking through the city or looking you know,
it's not like you're going to see them coming out
of most sidewalks in most places.
Speaker 1: Right right, Well, just so people, just so people know
what the thing of in picture when we're talking about them.
So we got three major clades, right, the solaganellas, the Isohetes,
the quill worts, which you know, like here in Texas
enchanted rock, which is just a big, you know, pluton
of granite that's got these ephemeral ponds. There's like an
Isoetes species up there. It's it's the quill worts they
call them. Looks like almost like a tiny onion, right.
And then so you've got the Isoetes, the celaginella, and
then the truelycopods, right, and so what what would be
like a good example of a lycopod, because there's some
that you get in temper regions. I remember being up
in the up in northern Wisconsin and there was like
this cool lycopod occurring in these Thuia oxidant tellus swamps.
So what would be like a good How would you
describe like one of the lycopodiums or like a podiella
to people?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so typically I kind of describe them as like
pipe cleaners on acid. They're basically they're almost like a
caterpillar like plant in a way. They look almost more
animal than plant in some manners of how their shapes
are formed. So they basically a lot of people call
them depending on the types. There's a lot of them
are called club mosses and firm mosses, which is one
of those, of course misnomers that it's like they're not
mosses and they're nothing close to them, but they have
basically it's like you took a conifer and you let it,
set it loose on the ground and let it scramble
over the ground and spread in this electric green color.
Many of them at least, and they always branch like
tuning forks. In some way or another, they dichotomize, and
those dichotomies will basically create these at least in these
sorts of lycopods, it'll create these sort of ground running
runners that'll send up oftentimes some form of an aerial
shoot that'll have little spore cones that are super durable.
They're almost like candlesticks. And so yeah, I mean, they
really are these extremely plastic, rambling, scrambling plants that in
many cases will be in bright sunlit environments. Though there
are certainly some like what we call Hoypersia and herpersioids
as a group, these fermases where they branch like true
tuning forks, where they're they're literally they have what we
call equal dichotomies, where every branch branches kind of like
a whisk burn or a wishbone into two equal branches.
And so they'll grow oftentimes in tufts in forest understories
and leafy forest under stories of broadley forests. And then
in the tropics, the vast majority of those species in
that family, like a podiac are many of them are
pendent epiphytes that grow in tropical trees.
Speaker 1: They look like these green really like a pipe clean
on acid is really that's a really good way to
put it. You know, you got like a podium anotonym,
which you get up there in Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula Michigan,
even greenland up in the northern latitudes, and then the
Dominican Republic. You know, I remember seeing some there. I
remember seeing a shit ton of New Zealand too. Oh
Lycopodiella is like really weird. And so they look like
this green pipe cleaner. But then when they're getting ready
to sporulate, they make this little yellow strobolists that cone
and then you know, you could tap it and it
actually sends spores out. But so they that's another weird
thing we should talk about with the silaganella's and ice
in the ice oweedies. I guess we'll talk about that later.
But they're heterosporus, which is, you know, people don't know
what that means. It's basically male and female sportes. But
the lycopodiums, though, are homosperous, right, just all the same sports,
just like ferns and mosses.
Speaker 2: That's correct. Yeah, okay, so they are homospers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so super super regardless, super diverse group. And
it's it's all over you know, hot, humid, cold, and
high latitude whatever, it's they're everywhere, the lycopodiums.
Speaker 2: They are, they are, and yeah, there's there's a wide
range of tolerances as you're saying. I mean they're from
the Arctic to the tropics. I mean, it's really incredible,
and it's almost you know, they almost would They certainly
were in Antarctica before it was glaciated, but they now
get about as far south as you can get in
Tarotl Fuego. I mean, they're often found in the heats
down there and wind swept areas, and they're right on
the edges of glaciers and it's been that way in
the fossil record too. If you go back about you know,
about three hundred sixty million years ago, back to the carboniphoros,
there are lycophytes that seem to be kind of on
the verge of the glacial fields in what used to
be these glaciated poles back then. So they've had they
certainly have this ability, and many of them do tolerate
growing in cooler environments, like I think they're centers of
diversity today are at elevation in the tropics, so in
sort of montane zones, mid elevations of tropical regions of
Central and South America, I think where you get the
most of them. But you know, the highest concentrations in
parts of Southeast Asia and through Africa are going to
be pretty much on mountains, like at mid elevation where
there's a lot of rain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, these are not most of these are. Most
of the Lyca podiums are not desiccation tolerant like solagino.
Speaker 2: It is correct. There are certainly some that have quite
a tolerance and a preference for growing in habitats that
get pretty dry in the summer. So many of the
alpine sorts of club mosses, there's a there's a genus
called die Fasiastrum that are basically called the ground cedars,
and they have almost this plastic like, you know, structures
to their their branches. They they really have these these
leaves that are almost fused to the branch and look
like little scales coming off them. They're absolutely gorgeous and
you can see them if you're hiking at elevation, I
mean near where I live here in the Cascades. You
can find them at elevation on ski slopes or you know,
going high up in the alpine sloane. They'll often be
tangled with mats of heats basically any sort of heathers
that live up here, but it'll often be very dry
peat that they'll be growing on in dry clayey substrates
coming out of hill sides, on the sides of trails,
so it's quite a They really like a lot of air,
a lot of air movement. And the wonderful thing about
them too is oftentimes they're they're quite a nice indicator
that you're in a habitat that has either I guess
from a human perspective, is pretty pleasant to be in oftentimes,
I mean, minus some of the steamy sort of swamps
where it'll be really hot and really sticky. Many of
them grow in very breezy, you know, mountainous, well lit,
you know, really beautiful habitats that are nice to be
So that's a plus if you're studying them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I saw they phase the ast from scariolsam
in New Zealand on the slope of the side of
a fucking volcano. Like beautiful, beautiful thing was I was sprrelating,
so you can tap it in and all this yellow
these yellow spores would come off. But I mean some
of them really, I mean, no, shit, do look like
cedars like a spinning image for like athuia or a
not a true seedar common name sorry, yeah, athuia, or
a juniper or some like capressioid weird conifer. It's so
you know, it's so bizarre.
Speaker 2: It really is. Yeah, it's it's it's really it's it's strange.
The level and the degree of parallel evolution that goes
on in these plants with other plants that are completely
unrelated to them is striking. I mean, they're almost sort
of a a chimera like group of plants. And you know,
and the thing too with them is that they they
change so much depending on where they are, like where
they're growing, i e. They they modify their morphology quite
quite significantly depending on what they're doing. So sometimes let's
say they're runners, like on those diapheziastroms, so you're describing
a lot of times they'll be growing on the surface
of the ground, but then they'll just dive underground and
they'll just start branching like hydras, and then they'll just
pop up.
Speaker 3: And while they're.
Speaker 2: Underground, basically the leaves change shape to become more oppressed,
and it basically is digging through the ground like a worm.
And then it just like spikes out and re has
this new you know, you know, coupressoid sort of growth
Habit just reinvigorate off of this what would have been
a white stem underground. It's just weird.
Speaker 1: Thelycopods too, the gometophyte like the haploid gamatofy one one
copy of the genome. There micorrhizal too, and a lot
of them like they need a fungus.
Speaker 2: Yes, many of them really do need a fungus. They'll
be some will be micoheterotrophic, so they'll they'll basically parasitize
fungui in a way themselves, kind of like some of
the airicacious fellas that you'll see in some of the forests,
like let's say in Sippy Northwest, a lot of the
irricascious plants are all yeared into trying to hijack basically
nutrients from micro rhyzal communities.
Speaker 1: Like ghost pipe or pine ross. So what's up with that?
How does that? How does that? If so a spore
has to land, I mean, so it's got to have
a rich micro hyzal community in the soil already, which
means it's probably growing in a healthy forest or some
sort of setting where the fungus is already abundant or what.
Pretty much it really depends on I think the different
club moss or the fermas species and what its ecological
preferences are. Many of them do grow, I mean, there's
quite a few of them that will grow and just
basically very stable forest understory environments, like we think of
these sort of hardwood forest understory.
Speaker 2: Plants in the Northeast, and those those certainly I think
are undergoing that sort of process you describe where the
there's already a really rich microhizal community there and they're
able to tap into that. But there's many of them
that are really colonizers of disturbed environments that basically they
don't face the same sort of competition. Many of these
are very much stress tolerating plants on one way or another,
and it's it's more it's more difficult for me to
envision what exactly is going on for some of those.
There's there's certainly been some work done recently on them.
I have less familiarity with with what's going on in
many of these, these stress tolerators that will take basically
these erosional you know, like landslides and hillslopes, where the
substrate is is very much it's it's poor in organic material.
But these gametophytes might take you know, years and years
and years, maybe over a decade sometimes to develop subterraneanly underground.
And not only that, many of these will have compartments
within their structure. They're basically places where they can farm
micaridza I can colonize and basically live inside of parts
of the tissue where they have like I think like
these it's really weird. I mean, if you ever get
a chance, definitely look up like an old school picture
or like illustration of a gammunified I mean they look
like these demented carots that are white and I don't know, tumorous,
like they're they're bizarre.
Speaker 1: And some of them can live for that long and
they communified stage like years or what.
Speaker 2: With Zero's sun. Yeah, they're basically almost I mean they're
basically almost parasitic at that rate for the early stage
of their life. And that then eventually when they do
are able to be you know, form archagonia, and some
be fertilized subterranean, you knowly by these motile sperm that
swim through groundwater and then they can send up this
their first sporofy and then start running over the grounds
once they you know, protrude out the surface of the ground.
It's kind of like kind of like an alien life
form in a way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what is it? But speaking of stressful environments, there
was I remember going to this I forget the name
of it. What was it. Was it Taupo or somewhere.
It was somewhere in New Zealand, and you know, there
were fumaroles everywhere and the ground was smoking, steaming. It
was basically you know the crust is extremely thin right there.
There's this huge body of of lava basically beneath the surface,
and the ground's really toxic in a lot of places
too because of all these gases being emitted. But there
was there were like four different lycopod species at this
site growing up through the trees, some getting six feet tall,
looking like little yellow ropes dangling down. It was so weird, man,
it was so you know, smelled like sulfur. The whole
place smelled like a fart.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It was really and they were thriving it. They loved it. It
was them and then a couple very acid tolerant members
of Mrtaesi and yeah, I think that I don't even
think there was and some maybe some apacrids, you know,
the airicacious things. Yeah, yeah, but it was just the
often crazy landscape.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: They were thriving. They were like happy as a pig,
and shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they love it. I mean, there's there's quite a
number of them that, you know, and and many of
them will tolerate just general low nutrient habitats where there's
just not a lot of nitrogen in the soil. There's
maybe not a lot of phosphorous and they'll just you know,
they'll they'll be fine there as long as they have
persistent moisture and they don't fully dry out. A lot
of those those club mosses and infirmosses can do okay.
But yeah, there's definitely some that are like extremophiles on
their own, you know, their own class. I mean, the
ones that grow around humerals. One of the really prominent
ones that you'll see is oftentimes they call them nodding
club moss or it's one of these sort of stag
horning horn like plants, but it'll send up these tree
like shoots off of this arcing, arcing runner or stolen
and they will grow, yeah, as you said, right onto,
and into the edges and the lips of fumoral vents,
and they'll grow in superheated soil. I was, I was
doing fuel work for his National Geographic Project years ago,
and I got to this fumeral vent in Hawaii and
looked down into it and there were what this this
genus of plants pel Inhey, which was formerly called like Podeela,
but it's been split off into its own group, and
they are these like beautiful, beautiful pendant Christmas tree, like, uh,
soorts of shoots coming off of these right, these these
stolens that are king down five six feet hanging into
a fumoral bent that's fully green, not charred green. And
then the entire lawn around them was germinating sporophytes coming
out of imautophytes that were in the superheated clay inside
the lip of the fumeral bent. That just like, what
are you doing? I thought this was cyanobacteria, but nope, nope,
is photosynthetic mutophytes. Do you think it probably needs that?
Speaker 1: You probably you think it probably needs those fucked up conditions,
Like do you think you could grow it like in
a lab like and you need that and probably needs
that that extreme condition, that soil temperature.
Speaker 2: And it's a really good question. Actually, it turns out
that a lot of these plants, I mean, they'll tolerate
those conditions, but if you just find a lot of
times if you give them pretty mild conditions, so like
those same ones, Yeah, you can just grow them an
augur in a lab under a grow light basically after
you you've played them, and they'll they'll germinate and they'll
grow them. Certain Pacific the auger and beaches.
Speaker 3: Fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they're tolerant be fine. Yeah, so they're like
they're tolerant, they're not obligate like serpentine endemics. There are
a lot of like limestone and endemics, et cetera. Yeah, Like, okay,
what is that exact? Before we move on from lycopods,
what's your what's your favorite species? Like a couple of
like just the weirdest, the coolest looking whatever.
Speaker 2: I think one of one of them that I can
think of offhand is, uh, there's one that grows in
the paramo of.
Speaker 3: Down Ecuador, Peru.
Speaker 1: I know it's gonna be. I know it's going to be.
Speaker 3: It's weird.
Speaker 1: Everything there is cool.
Speaker 2: There's so many cool paramo ones. But I would say
that one of my my personal favorites is a there's
a like like a podium that is related to basically
the like punk bottom common, very common, widespread species this
this space lineage down there. This species is called I
think it's like I'm invested, if I'm remembering correctly, do
that are vested? But I think it's based on the
root of the end of lico podium and it is
as its name sort of suggests it is silver, is
fully white, reflective metallic silver. And it looks like.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it, what the fuck? What the what
the fuck?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 1: Is that just hair?
Speaker 2: It's incredible?
Speaker 1: Is that just hair? Is it just tricombes or what
is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it basically is kind of like they have
I think they have reflected basically, the the epidermis of
the plant probably reflects a lot of it, So they
have It must be how the chloroplasts are arranged or
something like that. But they certainly have really prominent hairtips
that overlap, and those hair tips on the tips of
each owl shaped or these long linear leaves will overlap
in this sort of a dense helss.
Speaker 1: It looks like it's made out of aluminum. Some of
these look like they're made out of aluminum. Like they're
like aluminum pipe cleaners, These eight inch long aluminum pipe
cleaners just coming out of this this cliff wall.
Speaker 2: The soil they're in incredible, and they're stuff. They're super stuff.
They're kind of they're very very reinforced. They've got probably
a lot of silicon in them, so like they're sometimes
they're hard, like with a pair of prunters are hard
to clip because they're they're kind of bambooi in that way,
because they'll take up silicon from the soil water, and
then they'll deposit their tissues in the form of hytaliths,
and so you know, they have this sort of mineral exo.
Speaker 1: So what what is the what? So what is the
because equiscetum will do that too. Some of the equis
which is not related to this. And by the way,
if anyone else look this up, like a podium vestidum
v E S t I d U M from the
Peramo the high elevation equatorial latitudes of Ecuador as things
fucking would what is it? Why would some plants do that,
you know, take up silica? Is it just protection or what?
Speaker 2: It's a lot of different reasons that silicon can be
can be taken up by plants, and and different plants
use it for different reasons and are and have different
differing abilities to take up silica. So some some ranges
of plants, like you mentioned, the horsetails are a famous example.
I mean, they really use silica for probably for deterring
herbivores because it's kind of like eating sandpaper. I mean,
it grinds down your teeth. It's not it's not really
a great experience. Yeah, but the other you know, there's
other reasons too. I mean, silica can also help deter
pathogens too. It can be can really help strengthen and
reinforce the cells a little bit if it's there, and
so you'll have defensive you'll have structural use of silica,
and it'll have benefits against warding off disease sometimes like
bumble attack, depending on where they're storing silicon in their
in their cells.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you probably out there probably need a whole other
suite of enzymes to break down silica versus just regular carbon,
right right.
Speaker 2: So it's so it's interesting because sometimes in large scale horticulture,
crops will be dosed with with silicon dissolve basically silica,
which is really difficult because it binds so easily with
other sorts of elements and and so you have to
you're going to dose a plant with silicon in a pot,
which you can do for some plants. That actually is
a benefit of other plants. Well, don't try it on
like sphagn of moss. That that was a disaster. You
try that other sorts of plants, they'll actually really, they'll
they'll perk up and they'll create a much stronger sort
of structure, so they'll they'll basically strengthen up and stiffen up.
And that sometimes is used when when you're getting ready
to go into winter. For some crops and greenhouses. Silicon
can sometimes have benefits.
Speaker 1: But just keep it away from the spagnum. Don't give
don't get silicon spagnum, right the public service announcement.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, keep it away from your bogs, your your
local bog. Keep your silicon away from there. Keep it
to yourself.
Speaker 1: This So what do you think this? What was the
adaptive benefit in this species, like a podium bestetum of of.
Speaker 2: This silver, well in the silver and the silver itself
is is so is independent of it of silica being
taken up, but that silver reflectance, I mean, the main
thought would be that whether it's adaptive or what we
call xaptive, where something evolved for a reason long long
ago that may not be a parent today anymore, but
has become co opted for something today. Probably the best
reason I can think of would be UV reflectants on
these guys. Yeah right, so very high elevation, yeah, sunlit
sort of as you saw disturbed cliff faces, you know,
embankments of trails and mountain sides.
Speaker 1: So is that silver? Is that like a scale or
is it the like a trichome or how what is
it exactly? I can't really see from the photos I'm
looking at.
Speaker 2: I should check really quick. I actually grow it, let
me find it. I've got a little bit of this going.
If I were to look at it, I remember correctly.
Speaker 1: God, it looks so remarkable now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So most of what's going on is on the plant.
It's it's basically extensions to the margin of the leaf.
So basically the leaf margin extends out almost like a wing,
and is just this sort of paper like translucent sort
of extension.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was going to say, like a papery wing.
Or you're looking at like a physical specimen right now?
Speaker 2: Correct? Yeah, looking at it.
Speaker 1: You can't get much better than that. That's perfect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was just Yeah, it's hard for me
to remember, and on the pictures it's hard to sort
of see what's going on because it's it's such a
fine minute detail.
Speaker 1: Are you at your house or at the university now
or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not my house.
Speaker 1: I bet you've got a lot of nice stuff. Man,
Holy shit, it's like going to visit Martin Grantham, and
it's always fun going to the house. He's got something
new going on, some other weird, rare ass species of
plant from god knows where.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, Martin's place is a treat and I've.
Speaker 3: Not gotten to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the stuff he's gotten northern California, but but down
at least, visiting where he's at over in the Bay
is amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. God, this thing is, man, this is got that habitat.
I bet there's so much other cool shit grown around
it too. There it is apparently so this is really
wet too, right, really wet but high.
Speaker 2: Very wet, but very well. And it kind of depends too.
Sometimes you'll you'll find these sorts of plants that's sort
of the margin or the eco tone of where you
get dry, like really dry, so there'll be a lot
of fog up there. But sometimes they'll be right near,
right at the edge of where you're getting into almost
like this highland desert or grassland.
Speaker 1: It look like thick forest. Here it looks like chaperone,
kind of like a low growing plant community.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. So the at least people I've talked to
and colleagues who have been doing fieldwork down there, you know,
and some of the people I grow them for basically
are like, yeah, this was this was found and originally
collected somewhere where there was actually pretty paradoxically really dry,
but it was you know, cold, and they often had clouds,
and it is very humid, probably cold and humid, which
is a fun combo. And yet these plants can just
hang on if it's just if they're not fully desiccated,
their roots are doing a k many times once they're acclimatized.
I mean, they're they're pretty tough, but it's just they
don't they often sort of need a lot of consistency
in their habitat environmentally.
Speaker 1: So okay, so this is so this is uh, we
got this this lycopod. What is one more species in
this group before we move on from it? You want
to recommend?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's I'm trying to think there's there's certainly
yeah in that group. I mean another one that's that's
really amazing, that grows really huge, uh that I'm working
with currently is uh a flag mary or as Dalhousianus,
which is the possibly one of the most endangered of
those sort of lycopods. It's it's one of it's the
largest at least epiphytic Thupersia type relative, and it's gigantic.
It's yeah, it's these are amazing plants.
Speaker 1: Where is this native?
Speaker 2: These These range from Australia up through Fiji into parts
of uh basically islands in Southeast Asia, So it's it's
kind of it has a wide distribution going up into
Malaysia to down through be Guinea, Australia, Fiji, but it
is really uncommon across its entire range.
Speaker 1: Dell d A l h o U s i e
A n u s if anybody wants to look it up.
Fled mary ers p h l e g m A
r i U r u S. Yeah. That man, it's
like again it's like the silvery, glaucous blue, but it's
like these pendent ropes of giant pipe cleaners dangling down
six feet from a tree canopy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's some monster ones out there. I mean,
I've heard rumors of them being able to get tassels
that will grow like twenty feet long or something like that.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: And there you know, they'll be the stem itself is
about you know, maybe a centimeter in diameter, which when
you have these three almost four centimeter long leaves coming off,
it makes it. It's it's a very robust plant. They're
basically like Aracaria are kana like branches in width in
that way. But it's as you said, striking silver blue.
I mean, I have I have definitely a soft spot
for a lot of like glaucous plants. I collect mansonitos
and things like that at home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just.
Speaker 2: They're great. It's a beautiful. Yeah, it's really a nice
but it's also such a cool and neat way to
see how how plants will defend themselves from sun and heat,
you know, which, which figures into some of the research
of work done as well. But yeah, the Housianus is
an amazing plant. It's basically, I believe, diverges from the
other flag mariurus like it's its own group and it's
the last surviving member I think of it's it's lineage.
But it is also greatly imperiled. So they're on the brink.
I mean, they're pretty much, I feel like, on the
brink of extinction in a way because they don't they
don't grow fast and they're extremely difficult to cultivate. So
since there's such a gigantic and beautiful plant, they have
been prized by plant collectors and so they get ripped
out of the wild and usually die when people try
and grow them. So but once you've you've taken it
out of the tree, I mean again, those spores need
to germinate. If it does spread spore, it will need
to land somewhere that's ideal, have the right sort of
micrhysals ambiance, and it'll take ages to get through the
gametophyte stage to generate a parent plant.
Speaker 1: So the gomatify of these is really long. It's not
you know, for like anyone listening, doesn't you know, like
your ferns, Well, everything's got to commutify it. But like
on a fern gomatify it looks like a little piece
of lettuce, maybe a centimeter maybe less, and it's not
you know, doesn't last that long before it turns into
a SPORTI fight. But for some of these lycopods, the
gamto fyt that haploid single copy of the genome stage
can last for years, just dependent on micae riise. Not
even photosynthesizing just basically parasitizing fung it and the fact
that they need Michael rise too. I mean that already
should tell you it's gonna need like a healthy plant community.
It's it's not. It's not like a disturbance species something
like this. You know, it's needs intact forests, right, I
mean this is queen I see Queensland through New Guinea
probably up into yeah, so basically Australasia. So what I
mean that that's wild too? So is there Michael riise Like,
it's an epiphyte on the is there Michael riiseo rizle
fungus on some of the plants that it's growing on,
like the tree bark that it's growing on.
Speaker 2: What I think? So, so a lot of these will
basically live in what are termed almost like epiphytic like
peat deposits. So they're basically like peat islands up in
the sky.
Speaker 3: It is a way to think of it.
Speaker 2: And they sort of have I mean that whole group
of these, I mean, all these lycophytes, they came from
the ground at some point or another. They were all
terrestrial at one point or another, and then these epiphytes
diverged from those and were able to find something that
was analogous to the ground, but up up high where
they could beat the competition for light by just becoming
epiphytic and pendent, because again they're slow growing and they're
poor competitors. I mean, for most of the lycophytes tend
to be very poor competitors if there's anything else that
can get an edge or get growing fast. There are exceptions,
though there are some invasive Silaginella is like South African
slagno across Siana, which is often soil the garden centers
is a terrible weed in New Zealand and a number
of other places.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about the seleage, but we're gonna
with the whole rest of the podcasts. I want to
talk about Silegia now and about some of the cool
work you've done with these, especially as it relates to
major extinction events of the past. But just before we
do that, though this man, this the the god, the
habitat that something like this grows in this flag, Mary
ears del housenis like I would just love to I mean,
I imagine it's just like a really hot, humid but
can also dry out a little bit. Forests probably just
really hot. I mean this, this thick white wax on
these lycophyls has got to be it's an adaptation to
heat and sun or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. For so, I haven't myself been
into the field with them, but at least people have
talked to have seen them. Sometimes they'll be they'll be
at elev too a little bit, so like in Fiji.
They'll grow apparently at mid elevation or up a little bit,
but up in high in tree canopies, so they might
be dealing with a little bit higher elevation and sometimes
not certainly not all of them, I mean, like I
don't I don't think some of the ones like in Queensland.
So person to talk to about this species who really
has done a ton of work on them is Ashley
Field Australia, and he's really rediscovered basically populations that were
thought to be extinct in Australia.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, they're copyright ar Field. That the photo I'm
looking at. God, what a remarkable fucking plant though, Jesus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh man, they're They're incredible. And I ended up
with a bunch of them this summer which was crazy.
I wasn't fully ready to start growing these things, but
I was like, well, I don't have a greenhouse for them.
I guess I'm going to have to figure out how
to grow them under artificial light. And it's been a
bit of a devil, but I mean I haven't lost
them so far, but I'm getting a bunch of new
pups coming out from the bases of them, and yeah,
we'll see knock on wood. I mean, they seem to
be healthy and rooting and growing and you know, trying
to figure out how to grow them with limited sort
of space. But yeah, there's very few people in the
world growing them. I mean, Ashley is certainly one of them.
But they're basically in the US. There was one nursery
growing them for years, and that nursery shut down this
year and so there was a deluge of the specimens
that a person have propagated, and so you know, they
basically were out on the market very briefly, and so
I ended up adopting a bunch from the nursery owner
and we're.
Speaker 3: Hopefully, hopefully some of them will be propagated.
Speaker 2: A bunch of them made it to Thailand, thankfully, so
there's a hope that in Thailand they'll be able to
be mass cultured and that can alleviate a lot of
the strain on wild populations because if you make it
easier to at least work with an horticulture, it shouldn't
be as much of a problem. Do you know what
would be approaching though.
Speaker 1: With these like with like something like this one of
these weird lycopods, since they're homospores, they're basically putting out
bisexual spores, right, spores that it can either produce, uh
you know, sperm in the anthidia or the egg and arcagonia?
Is it if you just have one genetic individual, well,
can you get I mean decent genetic diversity from that?
Like are they self fertile? Can you propagate theoretically? I
know this is really hard, this one this species really hard.
But can you theoretically get new phenotypes, like new genetic
individuals from one or do you need two?
Speaker 2: In theory you could get it from one? Yeah, typically
with some of these homosporous lycophytes, you could. You could
take us a yield of spores from one one spore
cone or at least uh borangia and in one of
those Strobel eye and you can get you can get
a lot of gametophytes if if you're doing it right,
I mean, and that's sort of the big key is
a lot of these these flake mariuris and these suprasioids
are just a devil to germinate, and because you need
the michael a lot of times you do, but you
can still do it on augur apparently depending on the type.
But it's it's such a slow process and it also
you get I mean, if I remember correctly his studies
where people were trying to germinate many of these these
homosporous likewides, you get varying success. So there's very low
germination rates on some of these, like epiphytic ones. I mean,
it can be really difficult in the lab. Do you
get the epithetic ones to behave There was one person
by the name of Dean Whittier who really mastered this,
and he was he was germanating paramou pichophytes in his lab.
I mean, he was just it was amazing and agar
I mean, yeah, I think a lot of it is agur,
but like you know, some of it took years, uh yours,
and he would just record the ratio of how many
of the spores he he sewed with Germany, and he
gave really low germination rates sometimes on these things.
Speaker 1: So it's just so fucking weird, man. I mean that
for a ammetophyte, for a plant to for a photosynthetic plant,
or a plant that you know eventually produces CHLOROPHYLLM. Cammi photosynthetic,
for it to just live in at commutafyte stage not
photosynthesizing for like five years, that's talking last. That's that's
like alien shit, what the fuck you know?
Speaker 2: He is? Yeah, it's almost And again those sorts of
like they basically have some of them can basically have
these compartments where it's like a fungal factory where they
basically are inviting the infection of a microrhysal fungus and
then they'll basically give them space to grow within their tissues.
So it's it's almost kind of like some of the
plants in rhiny Chirt where you're back in Scotland and
billions of years, like hundreds of millions of years ago
in the Devonian, where you had hot spring plants, early
land plants that were colonized by fungi and had basically
layers of fungal like cultures in their tissues before they
had true roots.
Speaker 1: I forgot. You're a palaeobotanist too, and you know all
this weird shit that was, you know, extent four hundred
million years ago, fucking weird. Yeah, oh my god, it's
my goodness. Might be a long podcast. Jeff buckle in. Okay, Boddy,
it's all right, okay, that's all right. Well, yeah, that
that's I mean, god, damn, like could tell everybody about
the riny shirt. First off, let's just just fuck it.
It's just going there, tell everybody about the riiny shirt.
Speaker 2: What is it? Sure? So the rhine shirt is basically
this fossil deposit that we call Lagerstaton, which is this
this basically fossil assemblage that's a moment locked in time
that's so exceptionally preserved that we basically have a window
into this this ecosystem like exactly like a three D photo.
This is a this was a hot spring system back
in the early Devonian period, and it basically was capturing
through silica, basically preserving everything in three dimensional cellular level
detail throughout this hot spring community. And we're we're talking
about basically these these wetlands that surrounded hot springs that
were periodically inundated by the hot spring like hot waters,
and silica deposited onto the surface of every little plant
and every little animal that get hit with this superheated
silica solution would become basically entombed in silicon.
Speaker 1: So what time period was this? This is four hundred
million years ago for thirty.
Speaker 2: Or yeah, yeah, so this is like early Devonian period,
So this was the age of fishes.
Speaker 1: This is like soon after land plants above relatively speak, yes, right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, relatively speaking, this is basically after the first waves
of basically the diversification of land plants had happened. So
we're we're basically looking at these ecosystems where some of
the first the early early what we call vascular or plants,
which is a terrible term because everyone I knows days
moss and liverworts is like they also have water in
nutrient conducting tissues. But the plants that we call tracheophytes
or have these tracheods, these specialized water conducting cells, they
start diverging right this, you know, before this and this
is really our best look into an early ecosystem of
these seed free plants that didn't have roots yet or leaves,
many of them.
Speaker 1: Just how different did things look yet? There weren't any
trees yet so far as we know, right, like there
was none of this stuff was very large.
Speaker 2: Yes, so this was before shade was invented on land,
so basically really really sun blasted environments. I mean, it
would have been like another planet, and you would have
had substrates that really, for the most part, the organics
weren't built up very solidly yet in the substrates. So
the birth of dirt is sort of a way of
putting it. Sort of was happening at this time in
the first peat deposits were being laid down, and so
a lot of these there was sort of this clone
world where you had this patchwork quilt. If you looked
across these sort of lunar landscapes of basically rock stone
and clay, where you'd have hot green like acid green
sorts of fields of these tuning fork branching dichopotomously branch
a whisk fern like plants among them rhineophytes, a gleophytons.
Another famous one.
Speaker 1: What was the atmosphere like back then, like the atmosphere
and the temperature.
Speaker 2: Really good question. So up until recently we've thought that okay,
the atmosphere at this time must have had a super
high CO two level, and that the basically the atmosphere
CO two levels would have been really high, and you
would have had really high temperatures, so really hot, steamy,
you know, very very hot, muggy, humid environment from basically
the poles to the equator. So we had a lot
less diversity and the latitudinal gradient of climates back then.
But more recent work that was done in Europe by
a team of researchers looking at basically the stomata on
lycophytes from this time and comparing them across the world
and then looking relative to modern living flag Marierus growing
in greenhouses. They're basically able to calibrate and figure out
what the store model densies on lycophytes and response to
these CO two levels might have been, and it suggests
that the world was actually a lot colder than we
may have initially thought. So there's thought that there were
there might have been glaciated area US actually at this time,
and it may have been a lot more like today
in some ways, certainly probably a lot hotter, but possibly
not quite as steambathy tropical as we initially.
Speaker 1: Thought, not as much oxygen probably right for more oxygen
or what.
Speaker 2: Back then, I guess relative it probably would have been
maybe less proportion relative to CO two, So the CO
two levels should have been a lot higher, I would
think back then than relative today, but not so astronomically
high that they wouldn't permit glaciation in the mountains at
that time. And it's interesting, I mean that sort of
study that came out. I did a reconstruction for to
accompany the study of basically like trying to reimagine what
these landscapes looked like. And you know, it was basically
now like it's basically the same thing, but with with
glaciated you know, mountains or snow capped mountains too, which
I think is a nice touch, you know, But a
lot of what you would see in a place like
Ranny Churt would be very much just fields of these
plants growing in alongside waterways and watercourses and wetlands, how
big tall, like just mats of really small yeah, maybe
ten inches tall for some of the really large ones.
A lot of them are only a few centimeters tall,
like you might have had things like Cooksonia that were
you know, even earlier and are a little more enigmatic
and a little bit more of a waste spin of
a plant group where they'd be you know, they'd be
like a really large moss almost, but they'd be tiny
little tuning forks with you know, spore bearing you know,
basically sporangia on them, depending on whether they were you know,
actually what we consider to be true tracheophytes and somewhere
what we called paratracheapytes, where they we don't really know
exactly what they were. They might have been me to
fight dominant, and yet we've been interpreting them as sporopytes
for a long time. So there's there's a lot of
really topsy turvy things going on evolutionarily for lack of
a I mean, it's a really scientific way of putting it,
I guess.
Speaker 1: But it's like I mean, but it's it's such a
bizarre I mean, it's like nothing that we can imagine today.
Speaker 2: You know, it's so hard to make make what's you know,
make make sense of what's going on. Yet they had
that they had only evolved in in lycophytes, so the
forerunner of our modern club mosses we have, we have
the first leaves, however they're not by the time of
rhiny chert leaves had already evolved. I think in there's
a plant called Baragwanathia, which was the earliest mega basically
like a fight that enters the fossil record, and it
may have been something that was on its way to
maybe it was. It was probably a sister group or
an outgroup to what you looked at the family tree
of the modern like fights, it probably is branching off
of them, but it looks darn like some of these
modern big club mosses today. And Bragwanathia was the size
of like a timber bamboo. It was monstrous and I
don't know, you have to like they were big, like
the stem was maybe two three centimeters in diameter, and
then the leaves would be up to you know, like
basically four centimeters like two inches long. At least it's
plain off there. So like the thickness of this thing was,
you know, it's like a mid sized bamboo. And we
don't really know exactly what its habit was. We think
it was basically this prostrate meaning running along the ground
sort of plant. But you know, it's it's a little
hard to make out exactly what's going on because our
fossils are always fragmentary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it still looked like a green pipe cleaner,
basically just.
Speaker 2: A exactly a really really girsy pipe cleaner. But it's
coming on the scene. It was discovered in Australia and
described from the Silarian the late Solarnian period. This full sized,
full fledge leafed potentially rooted like a fight, so involved
roots and beads infinitely of all other plants, and yet
its date seemed to not line up for a lot
of paleobotanists. I mean, there were a lot of people
I think in the Northern Hemisphere were just like, uh
or the Australian's right on this date for this thing.
And as soon as like, yeah this is this is
Blade's Learnian. And so there's been a massive back and
forth and I think the debate is raged too, even
recently about what is the date of these bloody plants.
Speaker 1: They pushed have they pushed back the evolution of terrestrial plants?
I know it used to be like four fifty million
years and one of like if I teach the stuff,
that's something I always tell people. I'm like, you got
to have that landmark evolution address real plants four fifty
million years, you know, evolution of just right, just like
what you do with you know, evolutionary carreotic life, great
oxygenation event, et cetera. What is it at now? Is
it four fifty or did it get pushed back to
five hundred or what?
Speaker 2: I think there's been a I think there have been
attempts to push it back to about five hundred. There
is more work that's pushing it back I think further.
I might I know some pay bonders. You are currently
working on a work to push back the date and
may have some new evidence. So yeah, there's certainly it'll
be coming up and I guess in the plant news
at some point in the near future dates. But in general,
I mean, one of the principles with the fossil record
is in general is that we obviously have sort of
a fragmented view of the world, and what tends to
happen most often in the case of discoveries in Peey
Bonny is that you usually will find precocious occurrences of
things in terms of time going back in time. So
if there's anything that I'm usually not surprised by, it's like, oh,
we found an earlier version of this, Like Okay, I
expected that, Yeah, because it's we're only we're only seeing
you know, like you have such a low chance of
being fossilized as an organ of a plant that falls
in just the right environment that you have to figure
that for every one little fragment of a plant that
you see, there must be a heck of a lot
of them out there that never got into the fossil record. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That drives me nuts. I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 2: Does. It's the sort of thing that keeps me up
at night because I'm just like, well, what have we met?
What extent?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're just like, well what the fuck? Like you're
seeing one percent of everything that was there. You're like, God,
what what was it?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: I just want to know what it was like back then?
I want to know what was going on. Yeah, there's
just so much that will never know, you know, Like
I deal with that all the time with desert stuff,
Like a lot of desertsn't produce good fossils. It's just
not the right environment for it.
Speaker 2: And these are areas where innovation is key. I mean,
deserts are deserts, uplands are also there, arid lands, those
are key places where you rarely get basically preservation, and
I have to I mean, I could be butchering this
spin a little while since I've been looking back at
Rennie shirt type stuff, but my impression was RENI shirt's
a little bit higher elevation too, is the thought it
represents an ecosystem wasn't like on the coast. It might
have been more at upper elevation than typical, which was
also a really significant part I think of why this
this fossil sewich was so special for understanding the evolution
of plant life at that time. We just don't get
those sorts of what they call the hinterland sorts of
preservation as often and especially Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: Going to say it might have been too. I mean,
a hot spring, you know, it's producing this delicious shirt
material to it probably wasn't you know, it was probably
a kind of an extreme environment. Like you know, we're
not like what was the just regular old environment during
the Devonian? You know, what did it look like back then?
Because we're seeing this specialized environment that was great for
making fossils. It's all this you know, silica rich waters
being pumped out. But what is you know what it
just like the normal you know, something that wasn't an
extremeophile environment. What did that look like back then? You know,
did it get fossilized or has it been you know,
destroyed since then or what you know?
Speaker 2: And this is absolutely the sorts of questions that definitely
have have also you know, have have trouble with a
lot of pay bonus about this kind of system. Is
that are we seeing exactly the ro we are? We
are clearly seeing the effects of an ecosystem that has
is dominated by extremophiles. And extreme files are not the
norm usually across much of the planet. They're I mean,
extreme files are usually not your your typical opportunistic weedy plants.
They often they often have the ability to tolerate these
sorts of traits or these these environmental these environmental traits,
but they're they're not usually because they're like, yeah, I
can grow so much faster and everything else, and I'm
I'm able to reproduce so quickly.
Speaker 3: If you do, like I have to be able to
hunker down.
Speaker 2: And live basically at the equivalent of like a hydrothermal vent.
Like life might be really slow for me because I
can't access everything because you know, things aren't liberated or
or they're liberated in excess, like I can't I can't
take up all the toxins and all the poisonous metals
heavy metal that are in the soil. You know, like
I have to limit what I uptake.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's super hot right now, and so celluar processes are
like going haywire. They're really fast, and it's like no, no, no,
I need to you limit my inflow. Right, So it's
a very different strategy. But yeah, Rinie Shirt might not.
It's not necessarily reflective of everywhere on the planet of
course at that time. And we do get a really
wonderful glimpse too with Rhinny Shirt into the evolution of
a lot of terrestrial arthropods, which is really neat.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. What they look like, I mean, what
a little flee like it's pill bugs or fleas or
like what.
Speaker 2: Was Yeah, you have things that kind of look like
that sort of ilk. So you have the first actually
the first reproductive organs of an animal are captured in
the rhiny shirt in three dimensional detail, and that was
of a harvestman a little basically what people will call
daddy long legs. They're not the spiders, but they're part
of the group called opilionaires. They're basically they looked exactly
the same. Cool And there are some fossil deposits I
don't think they might not be in rhiney chirt, or
maybe they are where the first predator I think that
we have evidence of in the fossil record, or house centipedes,
and they look virtually the same as back in the
Solarium's so.
Speaker 1: Wild, man, Why does shit just not change? It's so weird, Like,
why does some things just not change? There's no reason to,
you know, it's crazy. Other stuff. Other stuff radiates and
diversifies and you get all these weird forms evolving and
then other stuff. He's like, no, I'm just done good
and I'll just sit like this for five hundred million years,
you know exactly, Witch, Well, my linea is just fine
like this. It's so bizarre, and it's.
Speaker 2: It's also crazy with things like that, like the house centipede.
It's kind of in terms of animal like, it's not
the sort of thing I would expect to see super
early on, and like even for the evolution of centipedes
for instance, like house centipedes, they've got compound eyes, they've
got fantastic vision, they got like pragmantis like vision, and
they're they have the most like advanced like respiratory system
of any terrestrial arthropod. They they're far more efficient at
taking an oxygen and it causes them to be able
to move at insanely insane speeds and have insane reflexes.
So it's like this hyper advanced arthropod predator is the
first thing that pops up, like about the epitome of
like advanced like metabolism. It's almost kind of like a
little mammal p Yeah like that. Yeah, Well, at least
the house centipedes are, and that's just this little group
of them. But I mean there's like ones that are
like you'll see in Borneo rainforest that get like half
a foot long, I mean, and they are terrifying looking,
look like something out of like a Tim Burton sort
of like fingers right like those have they can, yeah,
they can the common house speed that people have in
their houses. That scare the bejeezes out of them are
are not are actually totally harmless and won't break skin,
and they're they're quite beneficial to have around. So so
I don't recommend killing them, but if you do see one,
just remember that, Yeah, these things will probably run around
right sure, looking exactly like that. It's it's super cool. Yeah,
So it gives me like a different respect for some
of the things I see. But mites were really commonly
preserved in there. There were you know, there's even brancing
ectid's or the brankie pots. I think it was the
like clam shrimp and the vernal pool brian shrimp. Basically, yeah,
those things.
Speaker 1: Sea monkeys like sea monkey, right, yea, like sea monkeys
basically are are in some of these hot spring environments.
That doesn't surprise me because those things can drive. They're
also desiccation teleran through their fucking everywhere.
Speaker 2: Man they are, and that actually you know, and that
brings that to bear too. That you know, one of
the one of the things that we think about like
early terrustrial ecosystems, We're like, oh, these are like all
these like swamp plants that only can grow like with
wet feet. Basically and yeah, you have all these animals
and plants that have been mastering getting out of the ocean,
out of lakes, onto land. Really everything for them is
figuring out how to survive in this horrific, horrific planet
that is new to them. They're basically little astronauts trying
to figure out how to live. And you know, plants
were just they had to get cuticle, they had to
develop ways to keep their water in and not release it.
And it's just like every one of these structural innovations
creating spores with a uvy basically reflecting coat of flavonoids
and developing spoor oponents.
Speaker 1: Later. Oh yeah, because that's pretty cool. Okay, So let's
bringing it back to the the three clades of lico lycopods.
So moving on from lycopods from like the lycopodiums the
club monsters, and moving on to Selaginella and Isohetes, because
Selaginella and Isohetes are more closely related to each other
than they are to the lycopods, right, they form their
own little clade within the lycopods, Lycophytes, Is that true?
Speaker 2: That is true? So they they form their own clade,
which is basically dividing from as you're saying, those homosporas
are one score type to heterosporus having two score types
licophytes and so so Laganella and Isoetes are their own
two independent branches within that group. And it's likely that
those these sorts of plants that we're developing, what they
call heterospree, are two types of spores, which is basically
similar in parallel the evolution of seeds and pollen.
Speaker 1: Right, but involved in the pillar. That's what's so fucking
weird about it, man, heterospory and endospory. So the gametophyte
is now inside the spot exactly.
Speaker 2: So the gamautifyte stays inside the spore like a little
spaceship and it doesn't like leave, It stays its little capsule,
and just like a seed, it basically forms an embryo
inside and it's it's incredible, I mean, once after fertilization. Yeah.
So these plants probably diverged sometime in the early Devonian,
is what we think. Oh wow, that's far back, huh So,
so at least the predecessor to the heterosporous lycophytes was
probably start already somewhere on the landscape. By then, there
were scale trees, if I remember correctly, there were homosporous
scale trees in the Devonian, in the early Devonian. So
some of the earliest tree lycopods that had developed basically
secondary growth, they appear to be coming out of lineages
of these homosporous groups.
Speaker 1: And these were true these, I mean, these were big,
big guys.
Speaker 2: They some of them were, I mean they were probably
like you know, some of these might have been I
don't know, like fifteen twenty feet tall, which is good
size for back then.
Speaker 1: But we're not adendron yet, not like we're.
Speaker 2: Not a lapidodendron size. Yeah, we're not like getting a
six foot diameter trunk yet with one hundred foot long
you know whatever rise off. Like I'm sorry, stig marian
Acbe's coming out in every direction.
Speaker 1: That's fucking wild. To think about.
Speaker 2: Aguaro on steroids, it's like crazy. Yeah, yeah, they're they're wild.
But yeah, so they diverged sometime early Devonian, and they,
you know, really diversified. By the late Devonian. You start
seeing the predecessors of modern ice ese or quill warts.
Speaker 1: It was like four hundred million years ago about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is probably well yeah, we're getting getting somewhere
in the four hundred million years ago probably ranges when
everything starts diverging. I think from this, this having this
homosporous plan, I'd have to check basically what's been out
there more recent publications, but I think I think by
then you've already got something going on where you've got
the route to heterospery has already been established, and there
are some lineages trending toward that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what was the benefit of this? Why did
it evolve and stick around what was selected for?
Speaker 2: It's a really good question. I mean one of the
possibilities too, is I mean you really you start limiting
your ability to basically I think it creates opportunities for
outcrossing in many cases, but it also generates this sort
of this differential parental investment on the different sportes. So
being able to produce sperm is a much less energetic,
costly process or a parent plant at least to bestow
on it. It's going to to fight, you know, offspring
than it is to form an egg or a nova
basically an ovule, And so you basically have this this
difference in allocation that where the ovule is getting a
lot more of that parntal investment in this larger spore
over time, and basically these microspores are getting a lot
less and so I don't you know in terms of
being able to I think ecologically one of the implications
ends up being that, I mean, head osprey really allowed
plants to move further inland and away from the water
and have less dependency on water. These these plants are
sort of in that in a hazy area though, because
their sperm still is flagulated, it still has a tail,
and it's still still swim mobile, so you're still dealing
with this dependency on water, which you know, if you
look at sort of the evolution of plants through the
tree of life and through time, you see this decreasing
dependency on water as a key theme in you as
you look at the divergences of these more and more
terrestrial plants as you grade toward flowering plants. Now that said,
that sort of view of how we teach botany classes
is well, it's teleological. It's basically we basically present I mean,
two people learning about plants that there's a progression through time,
which of course an evolution, there's an aimless wanderer a
lot of times, and that things happen to work and
happen to stick and then lead to some nice things.
But a lot of times it's not deal in that
the plant is not necessarily like, oh, I could be
better at what I do by you know, just you know,
I don't know. Lamark is sort of this the lum
sort of evolutionary view of like, well, the giraffe could
just stretch out its neck more and every generation will
get better at what it does, grabbing bolthornicacias, you know.
But you know, we kind of teach plants in plant
biology classes a lot like that, And it's not to
discredit how we teach, it's just kind of how we
present it. And why I bring that up in particular
is that lycophytes are doing these experiments, basically these evolutionary experiments,
and they're they're converging in these very I mean, I
guess we would call it like in a quote unquote
advanced way. They're developing the basically an analogous way of
reproducing to seed plants, but they're not seed plants. They're
developing ways to grow into trees, but they don't produce
the same kind of wood that seed plants or lignophytes do,
and they've evolved roots independently through independent means of the
other plants too, And so it's almost like with lycophytes,
it's kind of like a Mister Potato, Like everything that
makes it a plant that you see has been evolved
independently of all the other plants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how That's the crazy thing. I mean, it's
just they've been around that long that I mean, every
god knows what else came up, Like what are the
mutations came up that the environment is selected for. But
this is what worked, and this is what the environment
kept selecting for, is these traits like the heterospore, the endospory,
the with with with the heterosport, the heterosprey did. So
every every species of Selaginella and Isoetes will produce both
a microspore a male sport, and a megasport a female spor. Right,
they're and they're not dietious in other.
Speaker 2: Words, yes, they well, to my to my knowledge, they
all produce megaspores and microspores. So the females the megagametophyte
carrying a female spore. Quote, you know, in a sense,
and then you have the microspore which carries the male gametophyte.
There are times where some of these plants will act
almost a little more like a dioecious plant. Now they
won't be truly dioecious though, so so there are times
like isuwetes, for instance, and some of the work we're
currently doing with ice sweetes, we've been finding that there
and you can see it sometimes in the field, but
sometimes I suetes, which is literally that little basically onion
looking plant or a little rush looking plant that you
know grows the bottom of lakes and invernal pools. It
basically the entire plant has been converted to a cone
to a strobelus. It's reduced to a stroblus on a
little micro block chunk of a former tree. Basically, yeah,
it is is weird.
Speaker 1: It's like a spheral arrangement of these leaves, except in
this case the cone bracts are photosynthetic, right yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so what will happen is effectively you can
get plants where they'll alter what type of sporophilm or
spore bearing leaf they'll form. So there will be some
depending on the time of the year that will only
be developing female spores megaspores, and there's other times you
know they'll only be developing microsportes. And then if you know,
you you hit these plants like let's say in a
vernal pool where you have a very anomalous climatic year,
like where you know they got basically a certain condition.
I mean, this is all theoretical. You know, you could
have the plants basically just produce female spores one year,
some of them some others might be stuck in producing
a male spore only, and they could effectively be dioecious
in that way. Yeah, but only temporarily.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but they've got the potential to produce both, so.
Speaker 2: To do both exactly. So let's you know how they regulate.
That's different.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about So with Selaginella, especially because that's
what you study, you you've found some pretty weird and
I think it was selegend that you were studying with
the extinction events right primarily or was it lycopods too.
Speaker 2: Or what so? So I've worked, Yeah, I work with
all all sorts of likecopods, so all the different lineages
at different times for different projects, depending but for for
extinction work. I've worked specifically with ice sweeties mostly. Oh wow, okay,
so tell us about that close to its heterosporous because.
Speaker 1: This is because this is some really interesting stuff. I mean,
especially you were working with the Permian extinction, the Great
Dying right first and foremost, right like that was the
time period. Tell everybody about this and just tell us
about your work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, so my work was sort of the Great
Dying has been trying to figure out what happened to
plant communities during yeah, the largest extinction or's history, and
why did certain changes in plant communities around the world
happen in the way that they appear in the fossil record.
And you know, a big part of this is that,
as you know, almost like ninety percent of multicellular life
seems to disappear or blip out of most fossil assemblages
across the planet. We see this tumultuous change in the
plant communities that really, you know, is unusual in so
many ways and it's not just like an like one
of the things we think about with like a mass extinction.
And probably the most famous example now that you know,
has really been worked on is the asteroid impact of
the Cretaceous paleogen R sixty.
Speaker 1: Six million years ago. Right, first off, let's let's let's
get our mass extinctions now for anybody who's familiar, So
there have been five, not including the one that we're
causing with all our bullshit, there have been five big ones.
The Permian two hundred and fifty one million years ago
is like the whopper, like shit almost got totally knocked out,
like everything died, everything, Like ninety six percent of life
in the oceans.
Speaker 2: What was it?
Speaker 1: How much?
Speaker 2: What was it?
Speaker 1: The percentage of life on life? Yeah, and what?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's yeah, I mean it varies depending
on what groups you're looking at, but I mean, you know,
basically we've said something like, you know, it's it's really
high up there. I mean it's like eighty ninety percent.
Speaker 1: Life sucks. Life really.
Speaker 2: Sucked, and it sucks for a long time too afterward,
which is partly what has been perplexing. So like with
the the asteroid impact, you know, much more recent extinction
with the with the dinosaurs dying out than the Permian.
So the Permian extinction happens, and actually has been argued
that without the Permian extinction, you might not have had
the age of dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: Right, because dinosaurs hadn't even involved yet. It was what
was a synacids or what was what came after the
those weird There are relatives of mammals, but they had
that big fan.
Speaker 2: Exactly. There were, yeah, relatives of mammals like demetrid on,
the sale backed fan backed sort of mammal life. Reptiles
we call them, which is a term that I think
a lot of people who study synoposides are take great
offense to. But for you know, for the purpose of this,
I will acknowledge that that's probably it's a it's a
description we use, but I guess it's helpful more for
just context. These are basically a lineage of reptiles that
have developed canines, differentiated teeth like mammals. They have whiskers,
they have fur. Probably many of them were probably warm blooded.
Speaker 1: There's a lot ofists who are mad at both of
us right now. You know, the first thing in their
forehead gritting their teeth.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah. The aino eruptions going on inside
the heads of many many creative minds right now, I'm sure,
And that's always part of that's always part of what's
fun to be in this field is we always have
have plenty to argue about, and you know, it's cool
stuff to actually argue about. It really makes you think
a lot of Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wish people argued about this kind of shit instead
of the dumb shit you see in the comments section.
But anyway, yeah, going on, So, okay, So this is so.
But Permian is two fifty one million years ago KT
or whatever they're calling I know that it's not the
KT and it's not called the KT anymore as sixty
six million years ago, but that with that extinction, the
dinosaur extinction is nothing compared to this one, right, What
caused the Permian extinction? What is thought to have caused it?
Speaker 2: A lot probably a lot of things happening at the
wrong time, is what the thought is so one of
I mean, this has been a question we've been trying
to work on for a while, of a least in
the lab I've been and I am currently working with.
And so we think that there is a and I
think when we say we, I mean I think a
lot of pale biologists and geologists have really seen a
clear link in time between the formation of the largest
volcanic Province or Igneus Province in its history of the
Siberian Traps, at least in the history multicellar life and
the disappearing of all these lineages of animals and and
the basically biotic upheavals. So it seems like that the
formation of the Siberian Traps larger I Gas Province is
integrally tied with just the wholesale destruction of many ecosystems
across the planet, both in the marine realm and terrestrially.
And not only that, there's there is a correlation between
a specific phase of volcanic activity of the Siberian Traps
that seems to be connected with the onset of the
real big pulses of extinction that happen so basically initially so,
so the Siberian Traps are basically this igneous province that
that spans the continent of like much of the continent
of Asia through Russia, mostly through Russia in extent.
Speaker 1: So this is not a volcano. This is like a
massive right, I mean, this is this is like you
can't even call this a volcano. It's so fucking human.
Speaker 2: No, it's like a system of you know, probably a
thousand gazillions of volcanoes that are in it, I mean
over time, and they're all you know, there's eruptions, and
there's massive lava flows going on that are basically forming
and what is this almost like hydrothermal vent system that's
happening on Land. It's a little like if you were
to amplify Greenland's volcanism, like but have a lot more
crazy stuff going on though, I mean, it's really one
of the things that happen the onset of its development.
As far as geologists have seen, it's been that there's
been what's called extrusive volcanism, basically a lot of explosive
volcanism of volcanoes that are you know, erupting at the
surface of the planet. But there gets to be this
point where there appears to be a switchover across much
of this province from extrusive volcanism to intrusive volcanism basically
being shut down above ground, and the lava moves laterally
underground and fans out across Russia and Asia. And as
it does and that lava moves through there, it basically
comes into contact with vast, vast coal deposits across the
area and most latitudely extensive sort of basically dykes and
sil complex anderous history. And then it also contacts these massive,
massive evaporated evapor basically evaporated seaways that were formed like
in the Cambrian in this region. So there were kilometers
thick salt deposits all over rock salt, and this lava
was just moving right through them. And as it came
into contact with salt and coal, it basically was outgassing
these nasty, nasty halogens and volatile into the atmosphere. So
the volcano is unleashing tons and tons of CO two
for a good amount of time. But now that it's
torching these coal deposits on a massive scale, like synchronously
across many parts of this province, you have enormous amounts
of methane and carbon dioxide emissions that are probably driving
the world into this global warming just hell zone.
Speaker 1: So a bad problem became exponentially worse. It's just very quickly.
So how are were these volcanoes erupting for I mean
it's like a few thousand years, tens of thousands of years,
millions of years.
Speaker 2: Or Yeah, there were probably pulses of this volcanism going on, yeah,
for you know, at least tens of thousands of years
to I mean, it goes basically there's thoughts that the
cyberine trafts themselves may may have even been active, like
from the end of the Permian period into toward the
end of the early Triassic there might have still and
pulses of volcanism going on within this region before it
really quiesced. But I mean this was all sort of this,
I mean, this was happening sort of in this pulse
manner across the province. That there would be these these
periods of probably more quiescent, like you know, less less
eruptive activity.
Speaker 1: Right for a little bit, and then start back up again,
and then it.
Speaker 2: Would just come back up. But you'd have, you know,
over and over and over again. The cumulative sort of
effect on you know, ravaging the atmosphere with this stuff
would have been horrible. I mean, and the CO two
is just part of it too. It's like, you know,
you have the coal is a really big worry. What
the team that I'm on has been really looking into
is what's going on with the salt and what are
the ramifications of the salt contact metamorphism with the lava,
and that is that when you take rock salt and
you vaporize it and then inject it into the atmosphere.
I forgot to mention too that as these basically silcm
plexes are moving around, you have explosive eruptive pipes that
form these diatream complexes that basically will just explode through
the hardened crust of the lavas that were formed from
the previous forms and then ripped straight into the atmosphere.
So it literally would inject with fire fountains right into
the stratosphere basically ozone depleting voltile.
Speaker 1: So this is like the this is like planet Earth
ate some bad sushi and then had like you know,
just violent diarrhea and puking for like fifty thousand years,
probably longer on and off with, but like a period
of fifty thousand years, ten thousand years. That's where it's
really going off, where it's really bad. I mean you
run into the bathroom every thirty seconds. Yeah, just shitty.
This sucks. I mean, this is getting bad. But I
didn't think of it. I mean I knew it was
a I knew about the deck and trash, but I
didn't know about all this other stuff, like the lateral
so like a dike is yeah, like a sill is
like a lateral sill. Rather, it's like a lateral channel
of a volcanic material underground, and that's then melting all
these other previously deposited layers of CO two carbon and
then that produces COEO two and then salt deposits, et cetera.
And what other weird shit was going to? You said, halogen?
Speaker 2: What was it? Some? Yeah, so there were just halogens
being unreleased, unleashed by these lavas. So there's been some
really neat studies by geochemists in Siberia looking at the
chemistry of these contact metamorphism areas where you'd have these deep,
deep eruptive pipes that we'd get through basically erupting through
these these salt layers, and you'd have, yeah, you'd have
direct mixing and contact metamorphism between rock, salt and lava,
and so you'd be getting methyl bromine and methyl chlorine
unleased straight into the asphere by some of these things.
And it's really what's really troubling too, is that the
stratosphere is lower, at least it's much easier to get
to in the Arctic and the Antarctic like towards the poles.
That's where basically the tropopause, where our troposphere, where all
of our weather happens. The boundary between the troposphere and
the stratosphere is lowest right at the North pole, in
the South Pole, and so if you position your volcano
right there, which the Cyberne traps most certainly were, you've
got just a perfect, perfect delivery system for injecting this
crap right up into the stratosphere and then circulating it
around the world. So there are there have been studies
that have been suggesting looking at these lavas that you'd
have near total destruction of the ozonelier oh during phases,
especially irene traps. So all that UV just comes pouring in. Now, yeah,
what's destroying the the methyl bromide. Yeah, so the methyl
chloride and the methyl bromide together, would you know either
both of them are fantastic catalysts of ozone destruction. Basically though,
when those the methyl bromine and the methyl chlorine, those
volatile compounds, when they get transported up into the atmosphere,
they can get up there because they're riding together, but
once up there Basically the chlorine and the bromine have
a strong affinity for the oxygen, and so they'll basically
knock an oxygen off of each those three oxygen ozone
of molecules and create two and just three oxygen radicals.
And so it's basically like this nasty, horrible like game
of billiard balls from hell on a on a molectro level,
so us ripping holes in the ozone layer, and particularly
too so so methyl chlorine is pretty effective ripping ozone holes.
You know, in the atmosphere. Ethyl bromide is far more
potent and far more destructive to ozone than chlorine. And
it looks like the lavas were the regions. So the
basically the the the strata that these these sills were
passing through were very rich and bromine. And so it
was really really wrong place at the wrong time.
Speaker 1: Probably damn that's fucked. So so but basically Earth lost
the ozone there probably for for periods it was close.
It just just disappeared and then it came back obviously,
I mean, you know, but for a period, I mean
it was really really shitty. So not only is that
there more CO two in the atmosphere, and these massive
volcanic eruptions that last forever. You've also got all this
UV starting to pour in because there's no ozone shield.
There's no UV shield the right.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, so we're not we're no longer protected from
a lot of the Sun's radiation on or surface during
phases of this extinction. And so you know, looking at
that geologic record, I mean, the geochemical records, it means
seem pretty persuasive to me at least that you have
this this stress that's pretty otherworldly literally that makes this
very different than a normal you know event. And yet
you really, we really didn't have we didn't have as
much of an understanding of how how ozone weakening would
affect basically plant communities worldwide during this sort of event,
because this is a pre flowering plant time, so the
forests were all dominated by basically seed bearing, seed bearing
sorts of conifers and their relatives and seed ferns, and
so so when I went, I mean, I had originally
read about this sort of work when I was like,
I was almost out of high school when I first
picked up a paper about this, like starting college, and
I was like, whoa, this is this is weird. One
of the things that came up was that right around
and and this sort of before I had as much
of a knowledge of what was going on with the
volcanism and the Siberian traps at this time. The first
thing that got me hooked onto this extinction was that
they're around the world. As things go to hell and
hand basket, you have basically these these spol these spore
spikes of isodes relatives that just start popping up everywhere.
So basically you get these phases where IDEs relatives take
over the world and they take over sometimes in places
for millions of years. And this is weird because i
odes is we know them today and as far as
we've seen the fossil record, are like the epitome of
a stress tolerator. They're there are plants that grows super slowly,
they reproduce, I mean, they don't do anything very quickly.
They're terrible competitors, and they basically thrive on nothing. So
they basically can live and they you know, they're also practicing,
you know, they can they can be a lot more
plastic in their physiology. So like isot aliens, we call
them that sort of the group that is modern icouse
or quillworts are part of this fossil ancient group that
are what we call quormous lycophytes. So they're basically these
lycopods or lycophytes that have quorms, these subterranean, fleshy sort
of storage organs. They're a little bit like a trunk,
basically underground, and that makes them pretty much kind of
a geophyte in a way. They the main plant itself
is actually underground and all we see are the leaves
protruding through through the surface of the soil or muck
that they're growing in. And so they can they can
practice camp photosynthesis just a succulent and so CAM photosynthesis. Yeah,
solycophytes evolved cam photosynthesis as well, independently like a yeah,
like a cactus, and they'll and they do it a
lot of times underwater, which is weird. So they have
aquatic cam photosynthesis that they've they've developed, you know, probably
over time, and it looks it's probable that many of
their extinct relatives did practice camp photosynthesis at times, but
they facultatively can switch depending on whether they're growing underwater
or above water. They can develop CAM or C three
photosynthesis so sometimes there's some isotains that don't even have
stomata in their leaves, so it's it's wild. So like
they're bringing up soil carbon through their roots, taking up
fixing basically root carbon or carbon in the soil, and
then using that as their co two in a way.
So they're they're like the quill work group is truly
alien in so many ways, Like they're just like plants
from another planet.
Speaker 1: And they're the only relatives of these things that were
once enormous and super dominant on Earth. That's even weirder too,
It's like, why the fuck, it's super weird. This is
all that made it through all those mass extinctions, just
this little, this little guy, you know, this little thing,
and we have these ones that are taking over the
world during the Permian Crisis or the Permian Triassic extinction.
And and when I first was picking up papers seeing this,
basically the person who I contacted, the person who's writing these,
her name is Cindy Loy, and she's at Smithsonian at
the time, and I was like, hey, so you are
describing that there are these there's these spikes of these
these lycophytes spores, and not only that, but there's spikes
of what look to be malformations in these fossil sports.
So these spores basically are released in unseparated clusters of fours.
Speaker 2: They're like they're niotic products. Like it didn't like the
plant either, didn't complete meosis properly. But you find across
the planet like all these like little clusters of four
spores everywhere in these environments where all the seed plants
are pretty much blipping out of existence at least temporarily.
They're not going fully extended. So this extension has already
been going on. I mean, this is already right.
Speaker 1: Conditions are already shitty, but these ice of weed, these
relatives are thriving, but they're making all these kind of
half dud spores.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at least from what we originally were thinking. So
firston I reached out to you, Cindy. Basically it was like, oh, well,
you know, it's interesting because here's another paper that I
wrote and it was looking at I basically section through
these with colleagues. So she and her colleagues section through
these spores using transmission electron microscopy techniques where they could
see basically just how screwed up were these spores, and
these fossil spores in turns, they morphologically look like they
would have, you know, were they even mature, were the
walls matured, they complete maturity. And so they turned out
that yes, in fact, these spores look like they actually
fully matured. They looked like they were in every other respect,
they look okay. They're just linked together by these velcro
like interlocking, ridiculously complex outer spore wall like filaments. So
they basically a velcrode together and if you tap them apart,
they'll just break apartment normal. And so there's a thought
that maybe this was an adaptation to something weird going
on back then and the UV sort of idea of
plants getting blasted with UV radiation. It might be nice
to have your spores kind of clustered together, especially since
those spores are coated in glass. They're coded in silica.
So i SES puts a silicoal air on its spores,
which is pretty good. Yeah, so there might be adaptive
benefits to this, And so the story started for me
was like, well, how didlycophytes take over the planet during
this time? And as we were saying earlier, you know,
they need specific environments to survive, and you do need,
as you were saying earlier, they need some sort of
a quality of the environment to do, okay, like you
do need for many of them at least today, some
microrizon probably should be around, and you should have some
some healthy intactness of the ecosystem. But here we are
in this absolute just healthscape where these things are popping
up like dandelions everywhere and there's nothing else in most environments.
So I basically went in was like what would allow
these plants to survive and other things to fail? And
for that we're talking about like forest suppression in places
for millions of years. Like there's areas where the forests
may have been suppressed for as long as the span
of between the evolution of Lucy and us, like you know,
hominids and US. No forests in some regions.
Speaker 1: Like five million, seven million years, like five million years.
Speaker 2: And this is easy.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about the foss work. You're looking so
you're looking at micro fossils, and for like five million years,
you're seeing a paucity of species diversity in the fossil record,
like there's just not a lot of stuff, like very
few things around during this great dying event.
Speaker 2: Correct and and you and you see similar trends across
the planet. Now you know, like those sorts of environments
may not have been the norm where you know that
the succession would be on halt for that long. I
mean usually I think things would be in the adders
manner of like thousands to tens of thousands of years.
But still that's a heck of a lot of time
to delay succession, Like that's weird. And you know, for
for reference, like the the asteroid impact that is correlate
with the disappearance of non avian dinosaurs, there was a
fer and spike and it was widespread, but it really
wasn't that long, Like it was only probably like you know,
we might be talking decades in terms of when the
ferns were dominant and then how everything was rebooted thereafter.
I mean, the folks I've talked to have studied that
fern spike had been like it's analogus to like if
you just cut down the rainforest and the ferns came up.
It's like they kind of just do what they do.
Speaker 1: And again, this is just looking at micro fossils, at
fossil spores entombed in rock, right, Yeah, in that period
of a lot damn So how I didn't know after
the k the extinction it was that so it was
not that long.
Speaker 2: It probably wasn't comparatively like and again we're we're using
the Permian triacity extinction as a reference here, so like
we really have a distorted sense like that succession was
crazy and it was I'm sure a lot more delayed
because i mean we're talking about years of darkness after
the asteroid impact. But really the story with that, I
mean is just can you survive in the dark in
a spore bank for a while. The answer is yes,
most things. Yeah, sure, it's nothing for most plants on
the planet to survive a little while. But you know,
if you're talking like tens of thousands of years, I
mean that's where things start falling apart, like in terms
of like ecosystems, like they just the how we know them,
Like things just go out of whack and everything gets
re scrambled and reassembled in a very weird way, and
you get into what's basically like a new steady state,
a new baseline where you have these low diversity, persistent
ecosystems dominated by these like ice eds, relatives, and I think,
you know, it's kind of business as usual for them,
like during those periods, they're just like, well, nothing's wrong.
This is just what we do.
Speaker 1: That's so cool though, But it was I mean, again
to re emphasize this was really I mean, the planet
was essentially almost sterilized, like there was just it was
so long that conditions were this lousy for life that
a lot of stuff just started After a while, things
just start dropping off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean in some interior parts of Pangaea, the
super continent at this time. Howthough the continents were mainly
globed together during this time, you probably have temperatures like
one hundred and thirty fahrenheit plus on average in some
of these areas cow or what. Yeah, probably from the
build up of the CO two over time. And then
one of the really devastating effects in research I think
that's come out more recently was that really a big
part of the destruction of the environment comes down to
deforestation in some ways, at least on land, and it
certainly had feedback loops with the marine realm, the destruction
of the forests and the delayed recession or delayed succession
of them. So the trees weren't around to take up
that CO two as much. So trees are hanging on,
but they're hanging on in places like you know, probably Israel, Jordan,
places like that where we're kind of dealing with paleotropics
a latitude. It's where you know, you had these plant
plant lineages. They see plant linages surviving the crisis, but
they're not in such huge coverage across the plant they
can bring down the CO two fast enough, and so
you have this absolute runaway greenhouse from hell, and you know,
it just really magnifies. In the Triassic and the early Traassic,
that was a bad time to be around.
Speaker 1: Most of the Yeah, I was going to say, well,
first off, and most of them will finished that really quick.
I want to I want to hear that pure yeah
a little bit, most of the Yeah.
Speaker 2: So most of like the synapsids, the like mammal like
reptiles that survived the crisis were burrowers. They lived underground
for most of the time and probably were nocturnal for
all we know. You know, things like Lystrosaurus was probably
the most common one. It's an adorable it looks like
a dugone on land with little little cute tusks in
its mouth like a higher ax meets a dugone with
a bit of a tail, not much, but very very
you know, barrel chested, front, front loaded like bulldog like
build and a little carries adorable features. So what was there?
Speaker 1: What was going on with the UV at this time?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 1: Really quick?
Speaker 2: I mean is that yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean basically the ozone was depleted for a while,
so you just had UV pouring in. I mean, is
that still the case or what we think?
Speaker 2: So we think that there probably would have been pulse
destruction of the ozone layer, repeated pulses and cyclical pulses,
so the the ozone layer will repair itself very quickly.
So when when we when we started like pulling the
plug on putting CFC's like chlorofluorocarbons from our refrigerators back
in the eighties with the Montreal protocol, the ozone over Antarctica,
the ozone hole that really forms that was man made
back in the eighties really started he healing pretty quickly,
like we're now currently on track to you know it
healing I think on the level of several decades from now,
so you know, it's on the order of tens of
years to healing from from an input of you know, volatiles.
But the problem is, again, you've got thousands and tastins
of these eruptive pipes that are forming all over the
Ciberne traps at different times randomly. So each one of
these eruptive pipes might have had the capacity to rip
a massive hole zone hole and it just and you're
also basically combining with with global warming, you might have
some exacerbation of some of those holes persisting longer. There's
there's some anecdotal it's not acdotal, but there's actually some
some work that's been suggesting that you know, wildfires and
things like that will prolongozone holes. So you know, there's
there's a concoction of these positive feedback loops that are
probably going on that are making this what should be
a short termed stress possibly persist longer than it should
is I think the.
Speaker 1: Thought but isoeatees that these isoetes relatives are doing fine.
What's going on with their sports where their sporm sports
seemingly uh bound together or be formed or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the thought the thought originally was that they were mutated,
and so there was a hypothesis that was proposed called
the mutagenesis hypothesis, where basically the world went to hello
handbasket because of mass mutations going on. That the world
was being like just completely you know, radiated, and mutations
were just you know, running a mock and a lot
of things, and that the the lycophytes were one of
the few things that were surviving and giving us something
in the fossil record to see. Now, you know, the
work I currently am doing is on figuring out what's
going on with those lycophytes. But the work I did
previously during my graduate school years was looking at what
happened to the forests and how did basically the forest
collapses happen and allow for these licopytes to do well.
And what we did find was, I mean, about a
year after the publication that talked about these global abnormalities
and the spores of the lycophytes came out, a year
later a paper came out by another group of researchers saying, hey,
we found seed plant pol that's malformed in China and
Russia right around this time too, and seems really abundant
in these places as these forts are collapsing and lo
and behold over time. You see this trend in a
lot of different parts of the world. Not every part
of the world, but you do see them pretty often
in many different assemblages that you'll see what looks to
be what they were calling mutagenic pollen of disappearing forest trees.
So the trees basically show a spike in these malformations
and then they blip out, which is very, very troubling.
And these are the same types of malformations you see
at Chernobyl in the pines and at Chernobyl same time,
types of deviations in morphology.
Speaker 1: So they were getting it was getting weird. They were
making this weird pollen and then they just go extinct.
They just disappear from the fossil record.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and well and when they disappear to the
funny part is, so we have these like these repeated
cycles of deforestation and slow recovery, and what tends to
happen is that the animals blip out really quickly. Like
the big crisis for the marine realm is these pulses
of extinction are huge for the animals and they just
don't come back. But the plants are kind of stuck
in this weird like they're almost like in limbo in
a way. They go through this weird limbo type cycle
like cycle of hell where they keep getting whacked over
and over and over again by something in the environment.
And maybe u V played a part in this, maybe
other things did too. We don't fully know yet. I mean,
it could have been a combination of a lot of factors.
But you know, it seems that the tree the tree
like lineages and woody seed plants are just not doing
well over and over again. And then every time they
get blipped out, the licophytes move in, and they're moving
in from these spore banks that they left behind from
their last insurgencies. So it's this very dynamic ecological seesaw
or teeter totter where you're either it's like conifers versusleopods.
Either your your seed your seed plants are doing well
and your diverse fern and seed plant and horse tale
communities are doing fine, or your locopods are doing well.
Speaker 1: It's crazy that you can tell so much about this
ecosystem from so like phenomena long ago, like two hundred
and fifty one million years ago. That's insane, Like before
the dinosaurs of all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, and it's really comes down to a lot
of the work that the paleopalinologists, people who stay fossilized pollenancepores.
Really that ends up being most of the information we
get comes from the pollen and the spora records, and
basically the places where this got sort of triangulated I
think the most are some deposits like in Greenland. My
colleague Cindy Layer, who I had talked to and eventually
worked in the lab of on these questions, she went
in earlier in her career and looked at basically describing
with colleagues what was going on with plant communities in
pollen and spore assemblages that landed in the ocean, in
the dead zones of the ocean. So as basically the
fossil record of the ocean is capturing these events going on.
The pollen raining down from the nearby coast is raining
down synchronously to see what's going on the plant commune
is the same time the animals are blipping out, And
that was sort of where this you know, you could
get this correlation of what's going on on land with
plants and in the ocean with animals.
Speaker 1: Yes, permian permian took out the trilobites, right, that's when
they flip out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that was an unfortunate casualty. I must say
that would have been a darn cool thing to see.
Speaker 1: Still, yeah, I wish, man. Can you imagine if there
was their fucking so every kid knows what the trilobytes are. Man,
it's like the coolest fossils, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they would have been probably like, yeah, you'd be
out there, I don't know, snorkeling or something like, damn
the trilobites, yeah, or trilobytes, ah, stupid trilobites. Are there
any macro fossils from these these Isoetes relatives? Like, do
you have any idea what they looked like? If they
were small? And they were probably big because the pollen
seems like it's so abundant, right, But I mean, is
did you have any good like tissues like leaf tissues
or stems or anything? There are? Yeah, And in fact,
there's only like maybe a handful of genera of these
is odes relatives that were preserved and they've been found,
you know, macro fossils of them, the most probably the
most popularized of these, I guess within the extinction community
is called plural Maya and pleur Maa is is basically
another one of these sorts of pipe cleaners on acid
in a way, but it's basically like a little Christmas
tree pipe cleaner. It's a it's a plant that actually
functions a lot like a silver sort in ways. It's
a monocarp, so it basically would form a big anchor
like corm underground that had little lobes, and from that
corm it would grow slowly early on in life, throwing
out these big fleshy basically great white shark tooth shaped
leaves that would just kind of splay on the ground
like a well witched early on, and then over time
is switched from this like big juicy icy wds looking
thing to suddenly would spike up and bolt and form
this one big strobelus at the top of spore cone.
Speaker 1: God, yeah, I'm looking at a photo online plural Maya
for anyone Elms to look at up p L e
U R O M e I A. Yeah, it looks
like a silver sword, you're right, like a wine silver sord.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they would have functioned a lot like that.
They're they're simil paris so they basically they'll they'll reproduce
once and then they die. And as far as we know,
and you know, my colleagues Cindy Loy and Evo Downstay
did a super cool paper I think back in twenty
twenty one where they basically looked at these fossils all
over Europe of these you know plurimia from like Sandstone
and places from the crisis, where they could see how
the leaves were arranged on the stems and they were
able to basically figure out that the growth basically that
the growth rate changed across the life cycle this plant.
Looking at the insertion points basically as units of time,
like how distant the leaves were spaced on the stem
became a measure a proxy of how quickly they were growing.
And they were finding that they start out slow, really
growing probably for a while, building up a lot of
mass netcorn, and then they bolted eventually right before basically
spawn and die. Had this like real fast like spike
that's a lot like a flower spike in a nagave maybe,
and then they would set spores and then yeah, they'd
be done.
Speaker 1: They're mostly like six foot tall, about six to nine feet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, something like that. You know, some of the
might have been only three feet lot. We're probably small,
but some could have gotten about six feet. Cool.
Speaker 1: Oh geez, I love thinking weird.
Speaker 2: To walk through a field of these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's another genus? What's another genus? You know that
I could look up right now. That was going off.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another another one that was back then was called
Anna Lepis, and it has a N N a l
e pis. And some of them, and some of the
Pleuramaya species may have been leafless even if I remember correctly.
So there's some of these where they're just leafless stalks
almost where they're just photosynthesizing stem. It's very weird, very reduced.
Speaker 1: How big was.
Speaker 2: I don't think it might not have been quite as
big as plural maya, or it might have been might
have been a few feet tall, some of them small,
maybe two feet some of them.
Speaker 1: The Triassic like cops. It's Pleuri Maya and Analepis. Relationships
evolution and origin. God man, that's so cool. That's like
a fucking sci fi novel.
Speaker 2: They're all and they're desert plants too, so these are
these are succulentlycopods, so they're living in Xeric doing probably
doing camphotosynthesis. There's research I think that is being done
currently to looking into this that will be coming out soon.
At LISTA saw a presentation on recently. They're it seems
like they're practicing camp photosynthesis. Uh, and they're they're living
in the desert, like just chilling in. I mean, I
don't know if they were tolering one hundred and thirty degrees.
But you know, some of these things might not have
I might have had a colleague who was telling me
I thought that some of them might not even have
had stomata. At times they were right through the tissue
the roots. Oh, right through the roots, possibly harvesting out
of the ground, kind of like modern ice swetes at
the bottom of some lakes or in the Andes. There's
one I sweeties up there and Dick Cola that does
that what used to be called stilites, and it I
think it lacks stomata, but it lives in like water
log soils high up the andies. Yeah, weird things like
we really just know so little about them at the
end of the day, like this, what we do know
about them is weird, bizarre and confusing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they're but they're opportunistic during this extremely shy
period on Earth.
Speaker 2: They're thriving, right exactly, They're thriving. And it's a time
again when like ferns are doing badly. Ferns are Ferns
are not able to take this stuff. Horse tales aren't
doing great. Like there's there's some places where horse tales
are kind of eking it in there with Plurimea as
odd bedfellows, but it's kind of like even those plants
are having a hard time. So it's like, yeah, you
really these things had to be tough as nails for
whatever they were surviving.
Speaker 1: But also somewhere in there the ancestor of conifers was
hanging out to I mean, it's like, yeah, I love
this stuff already.
Speaker 2: Well already there were the conifers had already been diversifying early.
So there was something like I thought there was something
like twenty or thirty lineages of early early conifer that
it went into the extinction, So started in the Permian.
Going into the extinction, you had something like twenty or
thirty lineages of early conifer groups and I think only
one of them made it through the crisis alive.
Speaker 1: What was what was what what lineage was it? Was
it Eric Carrier or Potocarpesi or the ancestor of both
of them are in idea.
Speaker 2: I think it was something even even earlier diversion than that.
There was probably I think the what was it the
Walkian So there was a group called Walkian confers. They're
super super beautiful things. They look like Norfolk Island pines reconstructions.
So it's spelled w A L.
Speaker 1: C h I A n Wulkian.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fuck, but these are I mean, these are there's good
macro fossils of these obviously.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great macro fossils. These you can find them some
places in the southwestern United States. You can find them.
Oh wow, oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah it does. It looks like it looks like
a Norfolk Island kind of. Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're beautiful things and the fossils are, Yeah, the fossils
are just absolutely jaw dropping. They're gorgeous, gorgeous, feathery planated
Norfolk Island pine like branches, bows that would dehiss off
of the plants basically as probably a fire adaptation was
recent research was done in the lab I was in
even and yeah, so like things like I think the walkins,
I think drop out or blip out then, But you know,
you have the extinction of all of these other sort
of oddball early conifer relatives and forerunners too. But interestingly enough,
coming out of the crisis, you already have something that's
in the potocarp lineage that was discovered I think in Jordan,
suggesting that basically potocarp lineage plants may have actually predated
the extinction and made it through. Wow, so already it
was quite a bit of And if that's the case,
you would have thought that the pine, the pines and
their their lineage would have already been around because they
break off his sister group from all the other conifers earliest.
Speaker 1: Right, they're more closely related to like need thems and stuff,
aren't they, I think?
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, need them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I have to look back at the Nali's biologies. I
always am wondering what where are they placed in conifers.
But it would make yeah, I mean, if that's my
recent stuff, I wouldn't be surprised total caps were that's crazy,
so ancestors of Remus and total Carpus, Yeah, was already
around and somehow made it through.
Speaker 1: That really really brutally.
Speaker 2: Extinctively did yeah, and and well which ya was? You know,
well witchia and E fedra and those sorts of things.
You know, there were there were fedrin type pollen types.
There was well which well which you like pollen types
around the crisis, those things were already well established. Well
whichia used to be a huge group, right, weren't there
There were like dozens of species and then oh yeah, yeah,
and they they have these if I remember correctly, I
wonder if it was like they had like football pollen
shapes or something like that. But like I remember colleagues
being in lab being like, okay, yep, pollen here. It's like,
oh my gosh, so it's super distinct, yeah, extinct ones.
When you guys are looking at fossil pollen, how do
you I mean, how do you do that? Do you
have to dissolve the rock with something first? Or is
it yeah, you got to use I mean a lot
of people use hydrofluoric acid to break down rocks to
get to this stuff. I mean, it's just it's gnarly.
I myself have not done I personally haven't done fossil
pollen and spore prep myself, But I mean all my
colleagues who do it, it's just like, oh my god. Yeah,
they're suiting up to go down the acid lab to really.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, it's really scary. I mean there's a buddy
system involved, like it's you know, you've got to work
with HF to break down a lot of these rocks.
Speaker 1: Yes, though, it's so, I mean, you're unlocking this time capsule.
So what So the pollen doesn't get eaten, but the
matrix that it's in gets eaten by the acid exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the matrix gets eaten by the acid and leaves
behind the pollen, and.
Speaker 1: The pollen is like permenalized with silica or something or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think in many cases, I'm trying to remember
if it hydrofluoric probably takes out the silica too, probably, know,
because yeah, like hydrofluoric, you have to you have to
store the acid in plastic like nalgene. Basically, you can't
stor it in glass because it'll eat through the glass.
Speaker 1: God damn Jesus.
Speaker 2: It's nasty stuff. Hydrofluoric is scary, Like a drop of
that stuff and you're like dead, like before you know it.
Like it's horrible. Yeah, yeah, like there will be times
like there's these horror stories about palnology laps where it's
been used and there'd be like some of it got
out of the humut or some of it was dropped
on the floor, and it's like they evacuate the building.
Like it's like Lily Scott Alien, Like it's gonna go
through the floor.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, I thought of the Alien movies.
Speaker 2: Man, I'm like, what, Yeah, it's like right from that,
like it'll just keep going. Yeah, I think yeah, I mean,
I know, like for like glassic can certainly go. I
don't know for other structures, like how the chemistry is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy about But what you're left with is
basically so the matrix dissolves and then you're left with
these little I mean, can you see them with the
naked eye even or what some of them?
Speaker 2: Some of them you can, so the the io Italians
or the ice sweeties spores you can on some things
so like modern for instance, modern i sweetz has the
largest spores of any plant in the world.
Speaker 1: No huge, Wow.
Speaker 2: You just pick them up in your hand. They're like
micro micromant dip and' do you know what?
Speaker 1: Yeah, my friend, my friend Matt Berger, got really good
photos of one, like took him under a microscope too.
But even like at the base of the little you know,
then this is like a two inch tall inch tall plant,
at the base of those leaves, you could, you know,
you could already see the spores. It was kind of wild,
like they are really large. I remember that because, yeah,
they're at the base of those like if you imagine onion,
you know, they're like the base of the onion sheath,
the leaf sheaths.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, yeah, and you'll see and many times in ice,
these they'll they'll disintegrate, so they'll they'll basically the leaves
might stay on the plant and they might disintegrate over time,
and that's what opens up and a niches the spores.
But the spores will often be buried in the ground
around the parent plant and they can wait there, you know,
and the dormant for quite some time. I mean, megaspores
and icuds have quite a bit of longevity, and so
you know, that may have figured into the extinction for
all we know.
Speaker 1: But for but for a spora fight to be created,
you need a male sport, a microsport, and a female sport.
A megasport to land next to each other or what.
Speaker 2: Just yeah, a lot of times probably in close vicinity.
But once there's a film of water or water in
the ground, groundwater that they can move through, imagine they
could travel little ways. I mean, these these megaspores, so
that the female gametophyte probably is releasing some sort of
an attractant for the sperm to come to it. And
then in many cases too particularly I mean I'm less
familiar with like solajanelle in terms of the breeding system
with with regards to basically the movement of microsportes. But
I know that in ice ds, in aquatic systems where
they're in the water and they're submerged, the microspores end
up often sticking to the the exterior of the megaspore,
and so they'll just it's almost like this little spaceships
docking on a big like little death start. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So once that sperm emerges from the microsport, there's not
too far to sort.
Speaker 2: You just go right into the Yeah, right to the archagonia.
Speaker 1: Is what does the sperm look like in isowheedies. I
mean it doesn't look like human sperm, like a weird
I should look that up.
Speaker 2: It's another thing that looks like it's Averridley Scott movie.
Like it's it's really it's insane. It's got multiple tales.
Speaker 1: So kind of like Ginko. It's so funny. So many
people don't know. So many people don't know, and I
can't say I blame them, because how would you know
unless you're looking under a microscope. But I mean, like
game Goes, psychads, ferns, mobile sperm. They're moving sperm. It's
sperm that swims. You normally don't think of plant parts,
you know, with mobility exactly, And that's that's a huge part. Yeah,
that's that's a that is a mind bending sort of
thing to think about.
Speaker 2: That. Yeah, they move in real time like animals. I mean,
the sperm moves just like an animal would or an
animal sperm would. It's it's insane, like just oh, yeah,
I think I found one.
Speaker 1: I think I found an image. Wait, iso, I think
that's it. What does it look like? Does it look
like some sort of weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, probably yeah, probably something like that. Yeah. I don't
remember how many tails some of these things have, but like,
I mean, years ago, I might have seen something where
they're like, yeah, this has like twenty tails on it.
Speaker 1: Jesus, it's like same jeez is, Like what what.
Speaker 2: Do you do with all of those different Like how
how do you coordinate that movement at that size and
dealing with like the what like the I don't know
Richardson's number or whatever it is, like basically how you're
dealing with like how water is, how viscous water is
when you're microscopic, how water sticks to things differently at
those sizes. I mean, it's just it's bizarre to me.
Speaker 1: God, I'd love to see I can't find a good
picture of quillwarts sperm.
Speaker 2: Of like, yeah, this needs to happen. There needs to
be somebody out there who's gotten under the scope and
gotten this. I can't recall seeing like videos of it
anywhere ever. But horsetails are draw equised them spermatozoids of equisitum.
That looks fucking weird. Those things, I mean, those they're crazy.
Later they h they move their God, yeah, there's.
Speaker 1: Spores themselves in equism because the spores themselves in equisitam
moved too.
Speaker 2: Scores themselves have eas yeah, and they can and they
move themselves. Yeah, I mean, God talk about an underappreciate
a group of plants those are and for how much
they're aligned, Like there's such wonderful things to.
Speaker 1: People have beef with them really just because they're weedy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well exactly, Yeah, like you know there and I mean,
and it's it's difficult. It's it's this love hate thing.
Like I I personally right now building up this like
repository of like all of the horse tales of the
world that I can get my hands on right now
and cultivating them so that they're accessible to researchers if
they ever need them. But it's like, I don't know,
it takes I have to really consciously think about everything
I'm doing around those plants in pots, Like I got
to make sure I know where I'm situating them, how
close are they to each other? Are these developing spores?
You know? Like I have to really do make sure
that they're not like setting spore and stuff like that.
So it is it's quite a labor blood.
Speaker 1: And this is you're talking about.
Speaker 2: These are actually these are horse tales.
Speaker 1: I I heard a weird outside, like the fucking guy
was mowing my neighbor was mowing my launch or my
lack of a lawn. I ripped it all up. I
was curious. I love it.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, Sorry, oh no, but that I was just thinking,
that's that's the way you could. Yeah, if you, if
you ever really really didn't like lawn and yeah, I
was really gonna get back at people from all the lawns.
It's like, just sprinkle a bunch of horsetail scores out there.
It'll just hate it forever, and then the great pars
it will eat up the mower head.
Speaker 1: Hey you are a kid man. I've seen those things
growing in the fucking out of comm of desert like
they were growing in a seat that they were growing
in a really barren, really barren spot. I think it
was equisitam giganteum or one of the other things in
northern Chile. Yeah, and I was there was nothing around,
it was barren, and there was just this fucking horsetail
and like a handful of other species growing in this
little green creek and everything else was just pink and
the sight totally barren.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, it was nuts.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: I was really surprising.
Speaker 2: But it's cool there what is there?
Speaker 1: What's there out adaptation? The aquisinums?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I don't. I don't know too much about it.
I mean, they they seem so I mean many of
them seem so able to deal with drought once they're
rooted deep into the ground. I mean they have such
deep rhizomes too. That part of it probably has to
do with that they're they have some area where they
can pull moisture within that sort of risosphere, would be
my guess. But there's other horsetails out there that that
deal so like the tropical ones, like like giganteum. I
mean you're dealing with a plant that's not seasonal, like
it's not necessarily got seasonality to it. There are other
horsetails that form like bowbills and things that you know,
like some of the northern equisdems that they'll just go
dormant for the winter. And I would imagine that in
the past there were ones that probably could go dormant
during dry seasons.
Speaker 1: I mean, like just like isolades. I mean, these are
this is a linear is that once had huge forests
like it was you know, members of this lineage were
once composed huge forests. The calamities then, yeah, so do
they have some way to seal themselves off from the atmosphere,
like if it gets super dry.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't remember what their stow model regulation
is like offhand. I mean there's some there's there's certainly
some of these seed tree plants where the stow model
regulations just not quite to snuff when compared to seed
bearing plants where they can really using ebsizic acid, they
can regulate the aperture of their stomata to release and
release water, vapor and take in oxygen, and a lot
of these will oftentimes have passive control their stomada more
or less, and so they're kind of like an open pipe.
I mean, they're bringing water up and it's just evaporating
getting pulled by gravity out their stomata. Yeah, but horsetails
are such such champs that probably just moving water. It's incredible.
And they also inside them they have basically currents. As
I thought, well, it might have been contested since but
I remember seeing a paper a while back that there
was high velocity winds that moved through the inner channels
hollowed out chambers of horsetails. So they have like this
countercurrent exchange thing going on with gases.
Speaker 1: I think, oh, yeah, because they're hollows. Yeah, I mean,
there's a reason the way I see it, there's a
reason all these lineages, you know, these old ass lineages
have made it to the present day. You know through however,
many mass extinctions and all the many extinctions and all this.
It's fascinating shit to think about.
Speaker 2: And even more.
Speaker 1: Fascinating is all the stuff that you know, you've we've
only got a few fossils of there's like you could
get an idea of what it is, but you're not
really sure, you know, and then all the shit that
just never got fossilized. It's just so man, this planet's
just been through some crazy shit.
Speaker 2: Like it's been hard. Yeah, it's been a rough it's
been a rough ride for this planet.
Speaker 1: So with you and go ahead, Sorry, what are you
going to say? Oh no, I'm yeah with you on
your work with the permean, you know and these plants
that the made it through. I guess where are you
at right now? And what do you yeah, where do
you want to go with that? Like what and what
do you think? Well you'll discover? I mean, so Isoetes,
these Isoeides relatives were thriving. What was Silaganella doing? Was
there Selaginella around yet?
Speaker 2: Or what. There were slaganella around at that time too,
and there are some of them that may have been
doing okay, firing all right in some of these ecosystems
alongside pleuri maya on occasion. Uh, those that were around
may have also been desiccation plants, tolerant plants. There might
have been some resurrection ones, I think, uh, and a
lot of the resurrection lineages are thought, I think to
have diverged before Gondwana broke up. So so the a
lot of these ones we see in this that really
have the nexus and their diversification is sent in the
southwestern United States going into central, Central and South America.
Really you know, they have origins that go back to
before the continents were splitting up, and so they've been
doing this for a while. Some of those really you know,
primely adapted ones to the deserts. But in terms of yeah,
basically where the work has gone and where it's going.
When I had originally encountered a lot of these studies
about the fossil record and the extinction, really all we
could do was kind of come up with ideas and
it's really the best we could do. We were just like, well,
we see a new trend in the fossil record, Well,
this is what must have happened, and we see a
correlation in the geologic record. Okay, this is what probably
did it, and this is probably how it happened. But
that's not science. That's that's saying correlation equals causation. It's
not the sign of method. It's not true science. So
like as someone who was trying to go into science,
as like, I don't really want to conduct my research
this way. I would like to instead of drawing trend
lines and comparing over time, I want to actually start
testing these ideas. Because we have so many different hypotheses
ideas for how this happened that we're never going to test,
why don't I pick one? And so I ended up
choosing the ozone weakening hypothesis because it just it made
sense logically from a lot of things that was going
on in the fossil record. And thankfully, many of these
plant lineages that did survive the extinction, or the ones
that did among them were Isueetes made it, you know,
at least the Isooitalians made it and left behind cool works.
So we have a really good analogue for and developmental
group to work with experimentally to pleurma, which is super
fortunate because if if I sweets was extinct, we probably
wouldn't know what to make of those things, Like it
would not make a lot of sense to us, I think.
Speaker 1: I mean when you look at them now, I mean
you can't tell, like undoubtedly just when they're morphology like
that these things are related.
Speaker 2: This is the same, right, right, But I do I
do wonder, you know, it would be strange. But you know,
if they if we didn't have ices modern modern wants
to compare with, it'd be like, what what was going
on evolutionarily with these things? And why? Why? What are
these things? I mean, I'm sure people would come to
the conclusion they rely like of fights, but you know
it's kind of like, uh, I don't know, so so
you know, there's that side and then the other side
of this. You know, what happened to the forests was
was very much of interest to me, and so I
ended up basically being like, Okay, well we've got modern
conifers that form similar types of pollen and have a
similar life cycle to what was growing then, and we
have the sweeties, and I basically start testing how U
v radiation in extremely high doses, like if you obliterate
the atmosphere, how would small forests placed under those conditions,
you know, respond, And how would basically reproduction be affected.
How would the development of spores and pollen be affected
between lycophytes and you know, these seed plants, and so
you know, I originally I took a look at the
forests and was doing research on basically Mugo pine, just
Pinus mugo, basically the alpine pine from Europe that's really
common in a lot of northern gardens as a horticultural writing.
And then I stuck those under basically atmospheres where or
like into environmental chambers under these lamps that basically simulated
something like you know, if you knocked out the ozone
layer almost and you know, variable of you b and
growing them for just a season under that, We found
that the same types of malformations we've seen the fossil
record are produced in these modern modern pines. And then
what was really weird though, was that while the pollen
is wacky, and we kind of thinking originally that well,
seems like mutated pollen would not be a good thing
for reproduction because your sperm probably wouldn't be swimming and
wouldn't be doing so well. Well if it was a
conifer that was German like pollen it that way. Most
of them are not. They have pollen t nation tubes.
And then we realized that all of the seed cones
were killed on every single tree under every single permian
UV simulation, like even the lowest one. The trees gave
up reproduction entirely. They just sterilized the forests.
Speaker 1: So that's why they stopped appearing in the fossil record.
That's why they went out probably, or it could be
it could be one of the yeah, yeah, and that
was yeah, just where do you get the UV lights?
I mean they're just UV lamps that are super.
Speaker 2: Strong or what super strong UV lamps? So we got
these Xeon arc lamps from this company in Whales and
had them shipped over and then we had a custom
radiometer that was designed for detecting UVB specific like wavelengths
as well, which was Yeah, it was quite an ordeal
to get those lamps.
Speaker 1: What do they make those lamps for? Like, what are
they made for?
Speaker 2: A lot of times they use them, so they use
ones that are nastier, so that emit UVC as sterilization
lamps like in chemical like in UH in flow hoods
or no in fume hoods basically, so you could sterilize
your your cultures of like microbes and stuff for extinctions.
So they'll have kill lamps and they'll have other ones
that are not as intents that are you know, using
UVA radiation that are used for are basically like checking
currency and things like that, and you know governmental uses
and like t s A and stuff like that, I guess,
But and then you have these UVB levels that are
reason we had to kind of finagle things like in
terms of get everything custom was that v B had
less of a there's less of a market for it
because it's kind of like, well, it mutates things, but
it's not like fully deadly, so we don't use it
for a kill lamp. But it's pretty deleterious and it
will kill you know, slowly. But yeah, some of these lamps,
like we used to I used to do experiments with
like daphnia, these little relatives of fairy shrimp and UH
and trups with a grad student who was looking at
EUV effects on and sometimes they'd be dead in like
five minutes under one of these lamps. Like it's nasty.
Speaker 1: There's the sun, there's the sun. Emit uv C or
just uv A and v B or does UVC get
blocked by the.
Speaker 2: Atmosphere, Yeah, you're correct and saying it gets blocked by
the atmosphere. Yeah, so it does get produced by on,
but it's blocked by the fact there's any oxygen in
the atmosphere, and particularly ozone. Usually you won't get UVC
hitting or surfaced, but you know, and and so so yeah,
uv B is gonna be with with an ozone hole.
Usually UVB is the one you're going to worry about.
There might be very minute traces of UVC that can
get through, but it's not I don't think it's it's
usually like you know, cause for absolute panic and warms.
Speaker 1: So like you, UVA is like a black light flashlight
you used to look at scorpions. Uv be's a little
bit stronger, shorter wavelength than than uvcs, like the nastier
uv really yeah wavelength compared to.
Speaker 2: The really short lavelength stuff. Yeah, exactly, and so yeah
that be that b whay. You know, the wavelengths within
uv B spectrum are enough to get the plants to
basically just give up on reproduction entire and it's it
was so weird because every one of these populations of
trees looked super healthy, like really happy little potted trees
like conifers, and you'd never think they were stuck under
like blasted with v radiation for like half a year. Wow.
Speaker 1: So they didn't they didn't display they didn't display any
other like negative phrase from just aborting. Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 2: That was the only sign aside from the pollen was
was getting wacky. So they were kicking out a lot
more malformed pollen, like significantly more than they normally would.
Speaker 1: Was it the clumping like the isohedes fossils or was
it just weird looking pollen like mutated pollen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was more often the sort of weird looking poem.
And and you know where basically in pines and a
lot of these conifers that were back you know in
the Permian they had pollen that was called sack eate pollen.
So they basically the pollen two little air bladders on it,
and I mean it really looks like a little Mickey
mouse head in a way like in Silhouette. They're they're
cute little things. But uh, you know, these these weird
little air bladders, the sac guy would sometimes be produced.
You know, there'd be more than two of them, there'd
be like maybe three or four, you know, five, and
sometimes they'd be twisted or enveloping the pollen grains so
it couldn't crack open to Germany, so you had just
and then you'd have misshapen ones or ones where the
sack guy were really small in size or really large.
So it's kind of a whole gamut of variation in form.
And you know, we we subsequently actually went through and
basically after this experiment, we wanted to find out okay,
well we see we proposed at this point that hey,
you know, you could have had the largest mass extinction
Aariy's history happen without anti kill mechanism if this was around,
Because all you'd need to do is basically just screw
up meiosis or you know, of the seeds or the
ovules of the dominant tree lineages across the planet, and
your entire food web collapses really quick. Yeah. Act, it
wouldn't take many forest collapses on that scale to knock
out a lot of the animal lineages. I think and
the plants just keep going through this. So like the plants,
and that was the other thing was really fascinating about
just this experiment, Like we had no idea we would
see something like that. That was a total Like I
remember the day that I started noticing these mummy cones,
like these little shriveled, mummified little cones coming out. Basically,
these little seed cones would emerge and at about three
or so millimeters in diameter, they would just shrivel up
and turn black. And there were some of these cones
and some branches these conifers would ooze out resin over
their cones, healing it like sealing it like it's a
wound and tuning it.
Speaker 1: But otherwise growing, Yeah, otherwise looking fine. That's so weird.
So so basically, and you can see how if this
lasted for as long as it did, and the premium,
like you said, lasted pretty long, eventually stuff just stops
reproducing and just starts disappearing from the landscape. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you halt your succession and you got a point
where you have you know, it really becomes a Children
of Men scenario where you just get you stop reproduction
and suddenly you're facing a real crisis suddenly.
Speaker 1: You know, I haven't seen that at Yes, it's.
Speaker 2: A great movie, but you know, when I watched it,
I was like so creeped out, and I was like,
oh my god, this is having so many parils what
I've been seeing in the lab. But like with with
a plant level or a plant sort of you know,
emphasis of it, and it's like, you know, it really
is disturbing that you you could I mean we we
sort of proposed at the end of our first paper
on this that you could probably be just taking a
stroll through a in Permian forest and you wouldn't know
anything was wrong, and you might be like, right as
things are getting bad, it's just that the forests are,
you know, they're kind of stuck. Like the older trees
are just keep living, but they wouldn't be reproducing anymore.
And if you kept having this for thousands of years
on replay, I mean even your most like ra calcic
trees are going to get trialed, like they're not going
to be doing well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then and like you said, like the cascade
of effects then too, because everything that depends on them
is just suddenly there's there's no tree cover anymore, there's
no you know, who knows that the ecological relationships of
those lamps life, but all of a sudden the animals start.
I mean, it's just nuts to think about that. So
why did isoes? Why do these isoez relatives like plurimea
and analypus, why did they what do you what do
you hypothesize? Why did they make it through? Why were
they inaffected?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean there's there's a couple ideas. We're in
the midst right now of trying to figure that out
right now with a series of experiens that we've been
doing over the past few years. And I mean it's
really yeah, I think what the culmination of a lot
of work that's been done and a lot of people
thinking about it today prior to I mean, the things
that we're working on in the lab right now behind
the scenes seem to be that there's certainly this stress
tolerating extremophilic ability in these plants. So they're able to
they're able to take whatever.
Speaker 3: They're hit with.
Speaker 2: In this environment, and they seem to be able to
either they're able to survive it. The sort of hypothesis
that we had proposed at least in our first work
on the forest collapses, is that really all you need
I sweets to probably do in theory would be they'd
be doing better than conifers in trees if they could
actually reproduce under those same conditions that sterilize the tree lineages,
and they you know, and then you know, everything else
kind of doesn't even matter. Almost like they can survived
long enough and they can persist to reproduce, they might
be okay. And so we've been doing experiments to try
and test whether that happens and whether we can we
can get those kind of signals. But you know, it's
it's a it's complicated though. I mean, it's these sorts
of experiments we've been doing. I mean, while the you know,
we're we're really close to i think public trying to
at least submit our first paper into publication about you know,
what happened on the ICBD side of it in terms
of you know, reveals and things. But it seems like
to me that the way we've looked at mass extinctions
for so long seems so shaped by like biblical like culture,
like the way we look at how things die, like
even uniformitarianism, like well, just some of the basic geological
sort of under pittings from early in the development of
field of geology really had to have been influenced by
you know, like just our thought of the church and
how we think things happen and how there's armageddon and extinction.
Biology kind of goes into that area. We we kind
of think of the world goes to hell in a
hand bask and it's kind of judgment day. But you know,
and I almost feel like it's it's great that we
we are working on things, like you know, there's there's
people working on the asteroid impact and we talk about them.
We've we've made that more accessible to the public. But
there's also this double ended sword that you know, like
the popularization of when the asteroid impact was discovered, you know,
as as a potential leading driver and the dinosaur extinction,
it suddenly made the whole view. I think of a
lot of these extinctions as oh, this could be like
this holocaust that happens overnight and everything dies, right, that
sort of idea though, like, well, it does play out
on you know, on ecosystem levels, and we see it
certainly today in places where you have mass mortality of
some things to disease or a freak climate event. At
the other end of the spectrum, it's like you you
pan out and some of these events like the Permian
are happened over millions of years.
Speaker 1: Right, It's not as simple. It's not as simple as
overnight end game. Yeah, yeah, the apocalypse. I could see
that it taints the view, you know, Oh, it's got
to be this way. When I was like, no, you
got to zoom out, you got to think of it
a little differently.
Speaker 2: You know, it's so true and and yeah, and when
you look at sign of papers that come out to
this date, I think the troubling part for me from
sort of the botanical nerdy perspective is that, well, you know,
when people who are looking at the extinction, they're looking
for the smoking gun. They want to find what was
the bullet that shot life in the face and killed it,
And it's like they're looking for the kill mechanism. And
you know, immediately when we started seeing these sterilized for us,
I was like, we're probably looking at the wrong thing
this whole time, Like this is probably not how this happens.
And you know, part of that was kind of going
back to like just what I was learning in undergraduate
like an introductory biology class. I think it has to
lay it out as straightforward to students than anywhere I
had experienced it elsewhere, like as a scientist, And I
still remember lectures of my biology teachers saying, you know,
like when we talk about evolution, we talk about natural selection,
we're not talking about you know, and we're talking about
like fitness, right. You know a lot of people will
say fitness is that Well, we construed it as like
in our our way that fitness something is strong, like
it's it's fit. But the biological term for fitness is
being able to maintain your reproductive capacity over a long
period of time and having a greater reproductive capacity over
time to pass on genes, to pass on generations and
continue a lineage over time.
Speaker 1: Right, And the quality of fitness too is dependent. It's
it's different for every environment. Well, like when I am
telling people about this stuff, what might be what might
convey fitness in a desert environment is going to be
completely antagonistic and maladaptive in a swamp environment. You know,
having hairs on your leaves is beneficial in a desert.
In a swamp, your leaves are going to rot, you know.
So it's it's totally the environment decides what is fit,
you know, and that's that according to the list of
character character traits in that environment, and that's different for
every environment. So it sounds like the permean what was
going on. Mean, yeah, there was a suite of really
fucked up circumstances that were going on, and it was
just that you know, that's selected for only a handful
of things making it through, you know, acting acting like
a filter and deciding what gets to what gets to
continue existing, and what goes extinct. But I definitely think
that the UV thing is pretty cool because a lot
of people don't associate, you know, the loss of the
ozone layer with extinction events. I mean, a lot of
people don't even know what CO two is linked to
a lot of extinction events, you know, a rise in
CO two or a drastic decrease in CO two. But
but yeah, man, the Permian I mean, it's it's yeah,
it's one of those I remember when I first learned
about it, the couple, I must have been twenty or something,
and I was just it was it's it's enigmatic, you know,
it's really mysterious. It's it's a cool thing to think about.
And so this group of plants thriving, it's fucking wild,
you know, like why.
Speaker 2: It's really weird. Yeah, and it really was. I mean
for me it was the gate my gateway into this
extinction and studying it was just like, well why, likea
fights and you know, that simple question sort of like
took me down this path of like the entire eco systems.
And yeah, it became so much bigger than that too.
But yeah, I mean it really this is one of
those instances and in the history of life where you know,
knowing an obscure group of plants actually makes a huge
difference in understanding how you know, the entire biosphere almost
came to its knees.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got to ask, did you guys blast iso
etes with UVB with those UVB lamps yet?
Speaker 2: Did you have Yeah, we have done it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to give away. I don't want to
go I.
Speaker 2: Won't give away the results. But we're you know, we
we're in the process of we've got a paper and
prep right now that we're hoping to submit soon. Yeah,
it's going to be weird, but.
Speaker 1: Let me know when it comes out, man, because I
want to Yeah, I want to share that. That's really cool.
I'm really curious what you find, so absolutely happy to
do so yeah, man, well thanks for being down to
do this. Uh we just did two and a half hours.
It's awesome. So I appreciate that I could talk to
you for another three man, because I know you're into
conifers and all that shit was what got me in
the bond and the first place, just thinking about these
past time periods and how different they were, and just
how fucking weird things looked. I mean, not even thinking
about the animals that were alive back then, you know,
just those forests just looked so cool, even if you're
looking at like I forget the name of the the
guy who's well known, he's dead, but he's a painter
who was always painting these weird landscapes with dinosaurs in
him and the trees he would always put in the background.
I just remember, like, you know, oh God, look at him,
just being like what the fuck? But all based on
actual fossils, you know, known fossils.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah they are. It's it's absolutely wild. And actually
today I was us on social media and saw a
picture that just blew my mind of an aracaria I
think somewhere and may have been somewhere in Brazil, but
it had an entire lawn of red cataleia orchids, just
distuning the entire trunk going blood red cataleas on an
our car. And I thought it was such a beautiful
image of how life has changed so much with time,
but in some ways not so much.
Speaker 1: So they're still with us, Eric carry Is Man especially. Yeah,
that's like a whole accat I could. I'm a right,
I gotta stand myself because I'll drag this podcast half hour.
All right, Jeff Banker, thanks so much, man, I appreciate it.
And where can people, uh, you know, learn more about
your work. You got a website or just you got
a couple of papers out right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got it. I got a couple of papers
out yeah. So some of those are on like Google,
scholar research Gate, those sorts of places. And then yeah,
and I often am posting all sorts of weird plants
that I'm growing and backing up and researching on social.
Speaker 1: Media, so Instagram or Facebook or what I do it
on both.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so just by my name, you know, Jeff
Banker on there, and yeah, there they're there. So if
you like a lot of weird Lika fights and conifers
and strange things, I've always got some strange stuff up there.
Speaker 1: Cool many. I'll share your Instagram page in the in
the podcast details. So man, thanks again for coming on.
I appreciate it anytime. Thanks so much, Joe, it's a
lot of fun talking about this. Yeah, you too, Man.
All right, everybody else go find us up by Jeff.
Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Take care, take care, right,