This Fossil Is Rewriting the Story of How Plants Spread across the Planet

The first plants to get a foothold on land are a mystery, because there are few fossils — except for Spongiophyton. But the enigmatic lifeform has been fiendishly difficult to classify. Now a beautifully preserved specimen has revealed itself as one of the oldest lichens in Earth’s history, showing that these organisms were already common more than 410 million years ago. “It’s a major shift in how we view the complexity of life’s first steps onto land,” says palaeobiologist and study co-author Bruno Becker-Kerber. Spongiophyton “likely weathered rocks, stabilised sediments, cycled nutrients and contributed to the formation of protosoils just before forests developed”.

Plants have a secret language that scientists are only now starting to decipher

With the help of modern molecular techniques, researchers have revealed that the plant cell wall is far more than just a container. Instead, it has active roles in cellular growth, reproduction and response to infection by constantly managing signals. Now, scientists are eavesdropping on those signals to find opportunities to tweak or add to them. Doing so could open new avenues to boost agriculture: for example, protecting crops from disease, or engineering new plant variants and sturdy hybrids.

Plant attracts pollinators by mimicking the odour of half-eaten ants

A species of Japanese dogbane (Vincetoxicum nakaianum) mimics the odour of injured ants to tempt the flies that feed on the insects to pollinate them. Botanist Ko Mochizuki noticed that flies were attracted to dogsbane, and found that the plant produces several scented chemicals that are also in ants’ pheromone SOS calls to their nestmates — the first evidence of plants copying ants.

The world’s oldest tree? Genetic analysis traces evolution of iconic Pando forest

DNA from ‘Pando’ — a vast forest made up of a single root system sprouting nearly 50,000 cloned quaking aspen trees — seems to confirm that it is one of the oldest organisms on Earth. Researchers sequenced hundreds of samples from the Populus tremuloides and found that it is between 16,000 and 80,000 years old. They were also able to track patterns of genetic variation spread throughout the tree, offering clues about how it has adapted and evolved over the course of its lifetime.

The Social Exchange Of Value In Plants

This video shows chemical signals passing along the leaves of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant as it senses the airborne volatile organic compounds, which are released by damaged plants. The signals are carried by calcium ions. The plants’ ability to detect their neighbours’ warning messages allows them to activate defences against herbivores. (Reference: Nature paper)

Stressed plants ‘cry’ — and some animals can probably hear them

Thirsty or stressed plants produce ultrasonic clicks that, when processed to make them audible to humans, sound like popping popcorn. Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants that needed water, or that had recently had their stems cut, produced up to roughly 35 clicks per hour. Well-hydrated and uncut plants made only about one sound per hour. The noises possibly come from air bubbles forming or breaking in the plants’ xylem, the tubes that transport water and nutrients from the roots to the stems and leaves. The sounds could be used to monitor plants in farming and horticulture.

A Nitrogen-Fixing Seagrass Discovered

Seagrass (Posidonia oceanica) has formed a symbiotic relationship with a marine bacterium in order to acquire an essential nutrient: nitrogen. It’s a survival strategy that has never before been seen in an aquatic plant. The seagrass co-evolved with the newly described microbe, Celerinatantimonas neptuna, similarly to how legumes solved the same conundrum on land. The discovery explains how seagrass can form vast meadows in coastal environments around the globe — and helps us to understand the best places to restore degraded ecosystems.

Blogger Comments:

Evolutionary change does not happen 'in order to' (purpose) but 'because' (reason and result).

Gene transfer from plant to insect

A pernicious agricultural pest owes some of its success to a gene pilfered from its plant host millions of years ago. The finding is the first known example of a natural gene transfer from a plant to an insect. It also explains one reason why the whitefly Bemisia tabaci is so adept at munching on crops: the gene that it swiped from plants enables it to neutralise a toxin that some plants produce to defend against insects. Early work suggests that inhibiting this gene can render the whiteflies vulnerable to the toxin, providing a potential route to combating the pest.

Bean plants show signs of intent

Research suggests that at least one type of plant – the french bean – may be more sentient than we give it credit for: namely, it may possess intent.

Balls of moss move like a flock

Squishy pillows of moss appear to slowly move across glaciers in a coordinated fashion, researchers have found. In a long-term study in Alaska, researchers tagged the rolling ‘glacier mice’ to monitor their motion. The herd seems to move in unison, at a speed of about 2.5 centimetres per day. Their motion didn’t align with the prevailing winds, and they weren’t rolling down a slope — so what propels them is still a mystery.

Bumblebees Bite Plants to Induce Flowering

When pollen is scarce, bumblebees have their way of extorting more from plants. The insects bite into leaves with their mandibles and proboscises to induce flowering up to one month earlier than normal. Chemical ecologists spotted the unusual behaviour in Bombus terrestris during an unrelated laboratory experiment. Artificial cuts were not as effective, suggesting that some chemicals in the insects’ saliva could play a part.

Oldest fossil trees reveal the roots of forests

The earliest fossilised trees, dating back 386 million years, have been found at an abandoned quarry in New York.  Scientists believe the forest they belonged to was so vast it originally stretched beyond Pennsylvania. This discovery in Cairo, New York, is thought to be two or three million years older than what was previously the world's oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State. The findings throw new light on the evolution of trees.

Trees "remember" heatwaves

A eucalypt can ‘remember’ past exposure to extreme heat, which makes the tree and its offspring better able to cope with future heatwaves, according to new research.

Plant-like fossils, believed to be red algae, found in 1.6 billion-year-old rocks

New scanning technology has given scientists an extraordinary view inside the cells of what may be the oldest plant-like fossils ever found. The find pushes back the date of the oldest-known identifiable complex plant-like fossil — also red algae — by 400 million years.

DNA reveals how pitcher plants evolved to become flesh-eaters

Carnivorous plants around the world all developed their killer habit in surprisingly similar fashion, according to a genetic study of distantly related pitcher plants from Australia, Asia and America.

Trees observed resting branches while ‘asleep’

For the first time, trees have been shown to undergo physical changes at night that can be likened to sleep, or at least to day-night cycles that have been observed experimentally in smaller plants.  Branches of birch trees have now been seen drooping by as much as 10 centimetres at the tips towards the end of the night.

'Fairy Circles' Explained

The chance discovery of 'fairy circles' in Western Australia's Pilbara region is providing new insight into one of nature's enduring puzzles.  The circles are regularly spaced patches of bare soil that form in uniform hexagonal patterns throughout arid grasslands.

New species of ancient tropical flower found in amber from the Dominican Republic

The discovery of a new species of ancient flower beautifully preserved in amber indicates that ancestors of today's daisies, mints and tomatoes flourished in Caribbean jungles up to 45 million years ago. The two flower fossils, found in the Dominican Republic, will help scientists understand how asterids — one of the world's three major evolutionary groups of flowering plants — spread around the globe. The amber formed sometime between 15 and 45 million years ago in a geological period known as the mid-tertiary, long before the Americas were joined by the Panama land bridge.

Venus flytrap plants can 'count' to five

Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants have the ability to count, according to a new study.* The discovery adds to the growing body of evidence that certain plants possess many animal-like abilities, even though they do not have brains.

* Blogger Note: This is not a new finding.  It has been known for decades and reported as such in the early documentaries of David Attenborough.

Pitcher plant's tricky trap pulls in the ants

The pitcher plant has developed a clever way to help it dine on batches of ants at a time rather than individual ants.  The carnivorous plant adjusts the slipperiness of its pitfall traps according to changes in the weather to entice more visitors to their sticky downfall, a new study has found.