Plants vs. Animals

Plants are just the hapless victims of herbivores, right? Wrong! Listen to how plants fight back in sometimes delicious fashion. 

Guest: Dr. Vikram Baliga

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Creature, feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
and Tipday on the show plants. Plants are often faced
with a variety of ferocious predators, which is, you know,
us animals, we love eating plants, but plants don't always

(00:29):
love being eaten. Now, sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't.
And being a plant can be hard because you got
no mouth, you got no eyes. How are you going
to protect yourself without the handy ability to punch someone. Well,
we're going to talk about the creative ways in which
plants defend themselves, which can be surprisingly clever. Joining me

(00:53):
today is host of the Planthropology podcast, Professor of horticulture,
doctor Vicram Buligo.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Welcome.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm so excited to have you me too.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
I was so happy you reached out and I am
thrilled to talk to you today.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
I am excited to talk about plants being devious because
I think that people have this concept that plants just
kind of sit there and then they casually take all
the abuse that you know, US animals dole out on them.
But no, no, they are out there protecting themselves, making plans,

(01:28):
well maybe not making plans, but you know they are
they have defenses. They are not damsels in distress.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
That's right, for sure. Yeah, and it's it's funny because
they do all these things, and I'm sure they find
us very confusing, you know, weird hairless apes like this
is here to kill anything that eats me, and we're like, ooh, spicy.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yes, exactly. So first I want to talk about the
wonderful world of plant toxins, which are something that you know. Obviously,
there are plenty of plants that are toxic to humans,
whether we eat them or get them on our bodies.
It can be painful or even deadly. But there are
some plant toxins that make human life better. It enhances

(02:15):
our culinary cultures, and so yeah, a lot of plants
produce toxins, and of course toxins can help defend them
from herbivores, including insect, larvae and mammals. It's also a
defense against pathogens. But I want to talk about some
of the tastiest toxins in plants. So I'm not saying

(02:36):
that you should pick the nearest, devious looking flour and
put it in your mouth. That can be bad, but
some plant toxins are actually pretty delicious, kind of tasty.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah, and it's funny because it's funny you bring that
up because recently I posted something on Instagram and TikTok
about how we shouldn't eat, you know, incredible toxic plants.
Apparently that's controversial if you can imagine, because apparently people
like eating their plant toxin sometimes, so you know, we

(03:10):
should definitely be careful. I think a lot about the
first guy who decided to eat a given plant and
all his buddies standing around taking notes. Yeah, right, you're up,
Carl Ford, eat the weird berry.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
See if he vomits, and if not, we can eat
those berries. Yeah, that was being a chef meant something
very different back in the day. Well, what's what's an
example of a toxic plant that people try to eat
that they shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
I think my favorite is the coffee tree. I am,
you know at this point about seventy three percent caffeine.
A friend, a friend of mine likes to say that
I died years ago and it's just the caffeine keeping
me animated like a zombie. But so, yeah, caffeine is
an insecticide. It was developed by the plant to try

(03:57):
to keep herbivores off of it, you know, so the
leaves to the berries and everything else. It's a strategy
to make sure that the seeds survive undigested long enough
to go germinate somewhere else. It just turns out it
makes us go fast. Yes, and it's probably the most
popular plant toxin in the world, which is a weird

(04:20):
way to look at it, but it's also true.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yes, I mean I live in Italy and it's definitely
a big hit here. Gosh, they love their coffee caffeine.
I actually I can have a little bit of caffeine
usually I have a little bit of tea, but espresso
is something that does terrible things to me. I cannot
handle it. I turn into a jittery mess. My heart

(04:45):
feels like it's having some kind of break dancing competition
in my chest. It's not a good situation. But yeah,
for a lot of people, caffeine is a lot of
a high dose of caffeine is what they need to
get through the day.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah. And I don't know if that was grad school
that did that to me that I became you know,
so it's kind of it's probably not good, and people
do have, like you mentioned, different tolerances to it. Like
I can drink a coffee and go straight to bed,
which is probably not good in the grand scheme of things.
I should probably worry about that. But I can't drink

(05:21):
like energy drinks. I don't know if it's the sugar
in them or what, but those definitely make me jittery.
But like just coffee, it just sort of levels me
off at this point.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, it's interesting because some people can't handle tea as well.
For me, like tea is fine and coffee doesn't work
for me. For other people, like tea is actually the
things that make them dittery, whereas coffee doesn't. I think
everyone's metabolism is different. But in general, humans tolerate caffeine
fairly well. It doesn't kill us. I mean, I'm sure

(05:53):
there's a level at which it could kill us, but
that would be like and it's a lot, that'd be
a lot, yes, But yeah, in humans, it impacts our
nervous system. It raises our heart rate, and it can
you know, kind of it acts as a stimulant, a
mild stimulant. It is a drug. It in that way
like it is something that physiologically impacts our body's nervous system,

(06:18):
but it's relatively safe. And so you have some caffeine,
your heart rate increases, your breathing increases, and for a
lot of people that helps them think, maybe that helps
them feel less sleepy. It's stimulating. For some people it
just makes you gitterate and you can't focus at all.
But you know, depending on who you are, it impacts

(06:40):
you potentially in a positive way. But what is a
moderate effect in humans is devastating to insects that want
to eat the plant. Like you mentioned, this is highly
toxic to insects, and it also impacts their central nervous system,
but in a much more dramatic way, where as we
would get like a little bit of a buzz with insects,

(07:03):
they can be paralyzed, they can even be killed. But
there are some insects that can tolerate a cup of joe.
In Some caffeine producing plants, like the nectar has a
little bit of caffeine in it, and when bees drink
that nectar, there's some evidence that it actually enhances their

(07:25):
ability to remember that plant's location because it's stimulating the
bee a little bit it's giving them, you know, mild
buzz pun intended.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
I'm sorry, No, I like it. We need more of that. Actually,
the more puns the better.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yes, well you've come to the right podcast for better
or worse. But yeah, so it helps these bees kind
of remember where the plants are. But for a lot
of insects that are actually trying to eat the plant.
You know, they're not just sipping nectar. They're trying to
directly eat the fruit of the plant. It is causing
this very bad reaction in this their system where it

(08:03):
is actually potentially killing them. And an added benefit to
caffeine in TA plants and other caffeine producing plants is
that it can kill off parasitic fungus. So it is
not just something that's wonderful in our coffee. Even though
it seems like the plants made this for us to drink,
like hey, thanks plants, thanks for thinking of us, It

(08:25):
was actually meant for the plants the whole time.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
And I think these coevolutionary relationships are so fascinating, and
I think that'll come up quite a bit today. But
the fact that it's good for bees to a certain
extent or the parts of the plant that bees interact
with are relatively safe for them. The concentrations are different,
but through herbivaly it's like nope, nope, do not passco

(08:53):
you know, you know, klay ten hundred dollars. Just like
again that plant I posted about, the angel's trumpet, which
is in the Brigmansia genus. For most mammals and most
insects like it is incredibly toxic, incredibly toxic. But for

(09:14):
their adapted pollinators, they can go in and drink the
nectar and they're totally fine. They have the you know,
evolutionary basis they need to keep themselves safe from those toxins.
And then they go when they spread the pollen and
the seeds and all that stuff, and just the the
mechanisms that govern some of these relationships are just so

(09:39):
fascinating me.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
Yeah, the specificity of it is really interesting to me.
I did see that post that you made, So the
Angel's trumpet, it's a beautiful flowers, this beautiful yellow trumpet
like flower. I just want to like stick my nose
in there and smell it. Is that a good idea?

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Not not great? It's it's not great all parts of
the plant. Some people argue that the nectar is not toxic,
but I wouldn't risk that all parts of the plane
are toxic. There was a creator online a couple of
years ago that made this whole video of carrying a
couple of flowers around and spending the whole night smelling them.

(10:19):
I guess because somebody had told them that was you know,
it's toxic, you can't do that, and they're like, I'm
going to do it for the cloud, and then they
ended up in the hospital because it can definitely get
into your brain that way too, but definitely ingestion is
the worst. Yeah. Sure, so they do smell good. They're
a beautiful plant. But I tell people, maybe smell them

(10:40):
from a distance. Now, a couple feet away, you can
still smell it. Probably don't stick your face in it
or blow it like a trumpet, which some people do
and kind of explains a lot.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
Maybe wafft it from two feet away, you know, Like
in chemistry class, you're supposed to wash things because if
you stick your nose in the test tube, it could
be bad. That was a lesson I learned in chemistry
after I stuck my nose into test tube and it
made my nose tickle. In a bad way. But yeah,
so there are definitely toxic plants we got to watch

(11:12):
out for. But yeah, like what you were saying, the
specificity of these plant animal interactions really interesting. And that
kind of brings me to talking about spice. So spice,
like hot spice, is another delicious plant offering that is
actually meant as a deadly defense. Like, how do you

(11:35):
tolerate spice seafood? Pretty well? Do you like spicy food?

Speaker 2 (11:39):
I do? I do. So my parents are from India,
so I'm an Indian guy and we eat all the spices.
And I also live in Texas and so we eat
all the other different kinds of spices here. So I've
grown up eating spicy food and I really like it.
My wife, however, like completely just completely out on that,

(12:01):
not tolerant at all. So we have to sort of
try to meet in the middle sometimes, or I'll just
add like spicy stuff to my own food because I
don't want her to explode burst into flame.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah. Yeah, no, I also like spice, and I have
thought that I've had a pretty high spice tolerance. But
I did once order like this super spicy drink that
they were like warning me, Hey, this is actually really spicy.
It was a I think it was a mango almost
like a mango smoothie, but they added some spice to it.

(12:35):
I was like, well, I've had spicy drinks before. It
sounds great, it sounds refreshing. That was a mistake. It
was a mistake I made. That was hubris.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Uh. Too close to the sun there.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Too close to the sun. I was like, four little
chili peppers on your menu. I'm sure that's fine. Uh,
it wasn't. It wasn't fine, folks, And it's not fine
for a lot of things that want to prey on
wild chilies. So spices are relatively well tolerated by humans,
and we have grown to actually cultivate spicy plants, like

(13:09):
the peppers that we have. They're not usually just stuff
we pluck from the wild. We've domesticated them, We've grown them,
so they have these lovely large fruit that are very
hot and very delicious. But the seeds of wild chilies
are also laced with this very spicy substance called kepsasin,

(13:32):
which is something that you don't necessarily want in your
eyes or your sensitive membranes, but it is something. It
is that thing that you know like when you have
a spicy food. It's tasty and a little bit or
a lot if you're used to it can cause a
pleasant feeling, right that like sort of burning to a
certain extent is good. But if you're not as tolerant

(13:53):
of it, or you have too much, maybe hypothetically, it's
actually quite an unpleasant experience. You start weeping. You have
all these responses to it that you know because it
is It is irritating your tongue, it is irritating your
mucous membranes in your mouth, and in plants, it is

(14:14):
a way to help defend themselves against herbivores who do
not like that sensation at all. It can also protect
them against insectivores, and interestingly, if they do get bitten
by an insect, it leaves them vulnerable to things like fungus.

(14:35):
And then that spice that kept sayesin actually acts as
a weight an anti fungal the world's most delicious anti
fungal treatment.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
And more of them should be delicious. Yeah, And I
think it's interesting because you mentioned that we have bread
and developed peppers of different kinds to be hotter or
less hot, or of different flavor. But some of those
wild ones, like the tiny little bush chilis and stuff
that are out there that are tiny and like bright purple,
will absolutely like take the roof off your mouth like

(15:10):
they're nuclear hot, and it'll taste very good. So we
have done a lot of work on a lot of
our plants. And that's something I think that's important to
realize too, is that the wild types of a lot
of these things, the you know, ancestral sort of plants
that led to what we have in our market now
are not what we see. We've worked so much to

(15:32):
select for things that we want and improve, like you said,
fruit size and flavor and color and all this stuff,
that there's some plants out there there, you know, genetically
very similar that would not be recognizable to most like
most consumers.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, yeah, Like you look at a wild banana, it
is not oh yeah, the comfortable handheld banana of today.
It's full of these large seeds that it is tiny,
and there's like hardly any fruit flesh in there that
you would eat without getting also a mouthful of seeds,
because the banana doesn't really just want to be eaten.

(16:11):
It wants its seeds to be distributed, so it wants
you to eat the fruit and the seeds, and then
what happens later, well, pody times and hey, you've planted
a new banana plant.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, and you know now we clone most of them
to be seedless. And so the big curved yellow fruit
everyone knows and loves, like you said, doesn't really exist
in nature that way. A point I wanted to make
too about since we're talking about peppers. So many plants
in the sulinacy family are just incredibly toxic in one

(16:48):
way or the other. It's just that we've happened to
find a few that will work for us, like tomatoes,
and well, the tubers of potato plants, you know, they're great.
The berries onto amato plants are not great. We call
them night shades for a reason. You know, you eat
the fruit and you eat the toxins, and then it

(17:09):
pulls the shades down and you go to sleep for
a while nighttime, maybe a long while. So yeah, but
all of the plants in that genus to a certain
or in that family to a certain extent. You know again, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, tomatillos,
and even the angel's trumpet that we were talking about

(17:30):
earlier is in the same family, and I think in
belladonna and several others. It's like all these plants that
are incredibly toxic all kind of hang out in this
same family, in the same genus. And then again, poor Carl,
the product tester, each product tester was out there eating
sulinaceous berries and like, oh, the tomatoes are okay, those

(17:51):
ones are okay, those didn't. Like Carl's not.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Asleep, Yes, sleeping, Carl was yes, long na, very long
long time now exactly. Yeah, no, it is so interesting.
And yeah, the the fact that it, of course, you know,
we can't we would have to like depend on other

(18:15):
humans to know if something is deadly to us, because
things that are deadly to humans may not be deadly
to some animals or vice versa. Like we might be
able to tolerate things other animals or insects might perish from.
And what's interesting to me like that that specificity of selecting, uh,

(18:35):
the the animals that the plant might actually benefit from.
So in the case of wild chilis and plants that
have capt sation, it actually is something that doesn't impact birds,
which is really interesting, Like any like if that bird
had my mango slushy it would drink that down, no problem.
It would laugh in my face because birds are not

(18:58):
really impacted that spice, the hot spice. They lack the
receptors that would cause that reaction, and while it would
cause pain to another herb before the bird's okay. And
the reason it's thought that plants have developed this relationship
with birds where the birds can eat something no problem,

(19:19):
and the plants have never really tried, well tried, they've
never really evolved. A defense mechanism against the birds is
that the birds are a great vehicle for distribution for
their seeds. The birds, they don't really have gnashing teeth, right,
so if they eat a fruit, they're going to swallow
it hole. To a certain extent, there's a little bit

(19:40):
of you know, rolling around in their gizzard and mashing
it up with stones. But like you know, they are
great for picking up seeds, eating the fruit. They digest
the fruit, but the seeds survive through their digestive tract
and then they fly off somewhere far away and they
poop them out. And a great thing about that delivery

(20:04):
mechanism is that a plant doesn't necessarily want all its
babies all in the same location because they are all
competing for the sun, they're all competing for nutrients. You
want some dispersion of plants, otherwise they're not as likely
to survive.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
Absolutely, and we see that with a lot of plants.
There is a native plant in my area called the
Yopon holly and the leaves actually we were talking about
caffeine earlier, have caffeine in them, and so the native
indigenous people of my area as well as cowboys that
lived in this area would make tea and coffee like

(20:42):
they call the cowboy coffee that they would make out
of the leaves and it was mildly caffeinated. And urbamate
comes from a similar plant. But the scientific name of
this plant is Ilex vomitoria for a reason. Has these
bright red pretty berries that are you know, colorful through

(21:03):
the winter. So a lot of people would try to
forage on them because it was the only thing that
was you know, ripe during the winter months in this area.
And they will ruin your day. Won't kill you, but
you'll have a bad couple of days. Yeah. But birds,
their metabolism is immune, and so they'll spread those seeds
far and wide, and you know, those relationships are really

(21:26):
just again very very interesting and reproductive strategies and plants
and dispersal strategies and plants are so weird in a
lot of ways, and they've evolved to be so bizarre
from like a animal perspective that they don't look like
I think a lot of us think they should sometimes
but it's like no bird, please eat this, please fly away,

(21:48):
go somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, yeah, the sort of I mean, obviously, a single
plant is not making a plan, it's not deciding to
have these things happen. But I think it's it's really
interesting when you think about, like the almost like the
fact that plants have developed these evolutionary strategies that are
actually really clever. It's it kind of shifts your perspective

(22:13):
on like, plants aren't just like these inert, passive things
when it comes to evolution. They are responding to their environment,
albeit slowly, right Like an individual plant may take along
a lot longer than you know an animal to respond
to its environment. Although some plants do have the ability
to like clam closed or flick something off, kick something

(22:35):
with a little trigger, which I always find fun to
see these plants that have those sort of like explosive triggers.
But yeah, it over a really long time scale. In
terms of evolution, they're very actively they're very actively adapting
to their environment, and they are interacting with animals, sometimes
aggressively and sometimes cooperatively for sure.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
And just as a quick sidebar, and I just thought
of this as we were talking. We were talking about
breeding efforts and all that, and solinaceous plants and plants
in the Sulinacy genus in dealing with climate change. We're
noticing that some of our staple crops like tomatoes and
egg plants and a few other things are struggling a

(23:19):
lot more. The pollen grains d nature over a certain
temperature and so we don't set fruit as well all that,
so we're trying to figure out how to make them
more heat tolerant. There is a closely related plant in
the same genus, the Solanum genus, called silver leaf night shade.
It's like a common weed around here. It's a perennial
weed with like super poisonous little berries, so good, but

(23:45):
it'll take incredibly extreme temperatures like one hundred and fifty
degrees fahrenheit. It'll still set flowers and fruit like credible temperatures.
So they're trying to breed some of that heat tolerance
back into eggplants, just as you know, some trials. Uh,
and they keep just coming up with poisonous egg plants. Yeah,
that's what I thought might which is, you know, objectively

(24:08):
pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Uh, not great in terms of what we're trying to do,
but uh, some of these efforts take time, and there's
so many like specific things, and like passing on some
of these traits can be so difficult. Like I think
we'll get there, uh, but we just need to make
sure we don't put out a whole bunch of poisonous plants.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a tall order, I think, to try
to quickly adapt plants for our broken planet when it
took us so many years just to like make an
edible broccoli. You know, you don't. You don't turn a
wolf into a dog in like a day. But yeah,
I mean it takes a minute. It's I mean, it's

(24:49):
not impossible, but it's tricky for sure. Uh, And there's
gonna you know, there's always these unexpected consequences of fiddling
with a sort of these selective adaptations, which are always
fun for Carl to discover when he has to taste
the egg plant.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yep, yep for Carl or Carl.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Well, we're going to take a quick break, but when
we get back, we're going to talk about plants out
smarting their enemies. So we are back, and like we
kind of were talking about before, it's sort of hard
to imagine a plant being clever or smart due to

(25:32):
the lack of brains or central nervous system, Like, is
there any is there really like anything to plants that
is sensory? Can they respond to their environment in any way?

Speaker 2 (25:44):
They respond to their environment in a lot of ways,
and we're finding out through more and more research that
they respond in ways that we didn't really like attribute
to them. So you know, the biggest one is light. Right,
Like light, it drives the way that they grow, the
directions they grow. They respond to gravity, they respond to temperature,

(26:08):
and they can sort of adjust their metabolism in response
to that. For example, when it starts getting towards fall
and the days get shorter, they get less sunlight, the
temperatures get cooler, they'll change some of the chemical structure
in the sugars that they're putting out to help winerize themselves,
or the chlorophyll will drain out of the leaves and

(26:30):
we see these other pigments that give us like pretty
fall colors, and so that's definitely a response to the environment.
We also see something interesting when plants are grown in competition.
Have you ever heard the term crown shyness?

Speaker 1 (26:45):
No, I haven't.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
So if you look at so if you were to
stand in a mature forest, a deciduous forest, and look up,
you know where you would think that all the trees
would grow together, you'll actually see gaps between them where
the crowns of these trees are trying not to touch
each other, and it looks really cool from above. I've
seen some like drone and aerial footage of like gaps
like lines and gaps between trees. And some of the

(27:11):
mechanisms for that is they you know, blow into each
other and little twigs get broken off and they grow
in different directions and things like that. But there have
been a couple studies that suggest that while like leaves
on trees or leaves on plants mostly absorb red and
blue light, a little bit of yellow and reflect mostly green,

(27:32):
they still do have receptors in some of these pigments
that will absorb green light, and it's thought, and again
this is a little bit hard to prove that they
can quote unquote sort of see each other. And so
green light reflecting off the leaves of one plant bounce
into the receptors of another plant at a certain like frequency,

(27:53):
as certain intensity, and the plant can kind of detect, oh,
there's another plant over here, I should put more into
growing away from it. And so there's these complex mechanisms
that they respond to each other. But then also things
like organic compounds floating in the air. Tomatoes tomatoes, if
you've ever grown tomatoes, they have a really really specific smell,

(28:14):
like they nothing really smells like a tomato plant.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, it's not tomatoes or tomato sauce doesn't really smell
like a tomato plant. Tomato plant. I really love the
smell of a tomato plant, by the way, but it
is different. It's like it is.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
It's really and it's really an interesting, unique smell. But
they have these little hairs on them called tricomes that
have a little bulb on the end, and when you
brush against them, those bulbs explode and releases release these
volatile organic compounds into the air, which other tomato plants
can detect and start producing defense compounds against herbivory. So like,

(28:51):
if a caterpillar is chewing on tomato plant A, it'll
release these compounds into the air that other plants in
the community can detect, and they'll start sort of like
circling the wagons, so to speak, before they're preyed upon. Also,
some of the predators of caterpillars and herbivores can detect

(29:12):
these compounds, so like wasps will come in and start
feeding on caterpillars or some birds I believe can detect it,
and they'll come and start picking things off.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
So these are the evolutionary snitch technique.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
That's exactly right. They call in reinforcements, they cry for help,
and it's again this complex sort of communication web, which
we don't really attribute to plants very often. Yeah, because
they're not, like, they don't have mouths, which I think
I'm happy about. I don't really want to know what.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
They have to say, but I just don't want to
see a pair of lips on a plant, honestly. But no,
I mean, I agree, I think that we underestimate plants.
You know, obviously a lot of These reactions are not
you know, an indivi plant thinking it through, but when
you zoom out on an evolutionary scale, it's really really clever.

(30:07):
What these plants have, you know, over many years of
evolution come up with so speaking of being mean to
caterpillars because hey, I love plants, so I love bullying
a caterpillar. Because caterpillars are sure, they're cute. I mean,
some are a little bit gross, but they are a

(30:28):
larva and their whole thing is to eat as much
as they possibly can. They are just like tubes with
a mouth and a butt and a desire to consume
the world because they need I mean pretty much just
with extra details. So they need all of that energy

(30:50):
to fuel a transformation from the caterpillar form into a
moth or butterfly. It's a costly transformation, so they need
to consume a lot of food and they can absolutely
decimate a plant. And what's especially obnoxious for plants is
the fact that butterflies and moths will often intentionally lay

(31:12):
their eggs on their plant of choice to set up
they're young with basically a plant trust fund. So they
hatched and it's like great, I'm already sitting on food
and then they eat that whole plant. So some plants
have developed a very clever defense. So the passion flower
is like, it's actually a whole genus of beautiful flowers.

(31:35):
They're almost like hypnotizingly beautiful.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Strange.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yeah, yeah, they look like they are some kind of
alien eyeball. It's really beautiful. It's just like wavy sunbursts.
Some are like this vibrant purple, some are these bright reds.
They're mostly found in Central and South America. They're also
found in Mexico and the US. And the Heliconis butterfly

(32:00):
genus is just as beautiful. It's got these beautiful black,
yellow and orange wings and it is also found in
the passion flowers territory. So we've got a little bit
of conflict, a little bit of tension here. So these butterflies,
despite being vicious plant murderers, are actually really good parents.

(32:21):
They want their babies set up for a good future.
So if they spot a plant that's already laden with
butterfly eggs, they'll actually move on because they don't want
their babies to have to compete with other caterpillars. It's
kind of like how plants like to disperse their seeds
because they don't want their I mean want quote unquote,

(32:41):
it is not advantageous for their offspring to have to
compete with other plants. In the same way, it's not
advantageous for these butterfly offspring to have to compete with
other offsprings. So the better strategy is to wait until
you find a plant that doesn't have these eggs. So
some species of fash and flower have developed a strategy

(33:02):
of mimicking the presence of butterfly eggs with bumps on
their leaves. So from what I can tell, it seems
like these are essentially like these sort of swollen glands
that are on the leaves and they they're like they're
three dimensional bumps that kind of look like an egg
has been laid there, and.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
It's yeah, and it's if you look at it, it
really does look like little clusters of butterfly eggs or
you know, caterpillar eggs. However, you want to kind of
cut that, and they tend to lay them these neat
little rows in these little clusters, and that is what
the plant has figured. I mean, again, we talk about
we anthropomorphize a lot when it's hard.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
Not to it is, it's really hard not to. I
even do it with my houseplants. I like talk to them.
I know that talking to them isn't actually helping them,
Like there's that whole thing of like, oh, you talk
to your plants, it's good for them. It's that's not exactly.
You'd have to be huffing on them a whole lot
for them to notice the co two you're producing. But

(34:05):
I still do it because I love them. It's just
so hard not to anthropomorphize plants, especially when they're so
smart like this one.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
Yeah, and you know, and I actually have a theory
about the talking year plants thing. I think, you know,
as humans will pack bond with literally anything. Yes, Like
I've got googly eyes on all like half of my
plants back here so I can talk to them. But
I think subconsciously we probably care for things better when
we anthropomorphize them a little bit, when we give them

(34:34):
personalities and names and stuff, and so that's you know,
I think it's more in us thing than the plants thing,
which is to me kind of fascinating.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
We're projecting onto them probably like all my plants personalities
are probably my untreated issues that I have but anyways, moving.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
On anyway, Yeah, but now there are just really ingenious,
clever strategies, and I think that you know, over time
we discover more and more and more of these, and
as our world sort of changes around them, we see
new things popping up and new responses to things that

(35:13):
we put into the environment and all of that, and
that it kind of blows my mind that, yes, plants
do adapt on a grand scale fairly slowly, but when
we really push them evolutionarily, like, they'll adapt pretty quick.
Their genomes are so flexible. They have you know, every

(35:36):
single plant cell has all its DNA, so it can
be any plant cell. And because of that, they have
this really swift adaptation at times to different things. And
again they just need the right push and they kind
of start figuring things out, so to speak.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Can you think of an example of plants adapting to
sort of human influence and not like not our sort
of selective unnatural selection of plants, but a wild plant
sort of I know, I don't want to put you
on the spot, but like a wild plant adapting to
sort of human influence environmental changes, so.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
You know, evolutionarily, I don't know specifically, but I think
often of plants that if even if they're not like
actively adapting the things, they're taking advantage of human intervention.
So a great example is a plant called kudzuo, which

(36:36):
is this super aggressive vining plant that they planted throughout
the southeastern US and I believe it's I'm probably going
to be wrong about this. It's I believe it's native
to parts of South America. Really aggressive, grows on hillsides,
and they planted it throughout Georgia and the American southeast

(36:56):
for soil conservation. So they were like, oh, this grows fast,
it grows lots of roots. We can plant it on
a hillside. The hillsides won't slide into our cities anymore,
which is if you are someone who enjoys cities, having
mountains not end up in the middle of it is
usually useful. But this, yeah, this plant though, is so
aggressive outside of its native habitat, where you know it

(37:20):
has some checks and balances from herbivy and different things
that like you can look at six month time lapses
of like houses disappearing and like telephone poles just looking
like trees just covered in kudzoo, and they're so adept
to growing on anything like even porous like brick, or
like they grow on trees natively, so they'll grow up

(37:42):
telephone poles and cover wires. So you know, it's not
necessarily that they have evolved that rapidly to overcome some things.
But they're just so well adapted to some of the
regions where we throw them that they're like, oh, yeah, no,
this is great. I'll grow everywhere and you can't stop me.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
The unstoppable plant. I wonder why we haven't had a
horror movie about Kadzoo.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
It seems like other should be.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean like winds, because we did have
We had the happening, but I feel like that wasn't
as exciting as like a vine that grows so fast
it can just devour you.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, if your dog stands still too long. Yeah, you know.
Actually a better example probably in it's not something that
we have purposefully selected for, but we're seeing wild populations
of plants developing lots of herbicide resistance in agricultural lands,
so where we go out and we spray herbicides to
like control weeds in our field, keep our fields clean

(38:46):
and all of that. You know, any kind of chemical
intervention selects for resistant populations. Right, if you're not getting
rid of every individual, the ones that survive in general
have resistance, and that's why we have or can develop resistance.
Like that's where we're seeing like you know, antibiotic resistant

(39:06):
staphylococcus and all these other things. So we have an
amaranth it's called palmer amaranth that's a really common like
agricultural weed out in our part of the country here
in the US, and some of the common herbicides that
have been used over the past thirty years through like
bad application practice, overuse, all of these things, we have

(39:31):
populations of this weed now or this plant weed is
sort of a loaded, you know, stigmatized subjective kind of term. Yeah,
but we've got populations of this plant that are almost
completely resistant to these herbicides that just worked a decade ago,
and now you can't control them in a lot of
our fields, and they're crossing out with wild populations. And

(39:55):
we're seeing a lot of those types of problems with
really aggressive plants, maybe introduced plants that are starting to
move into and cause problems in native ecosystems. And so
that is I mean, that's pretty rapid adaptation and evolution
over ten twenty years of just hard selecting for resistant populations.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
So what you're saying is we are breeding an army
of unstoppable superplants that should have a grudge against us
because we did try to kill them.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah, yeah, no, and yeah. And they'll play you know,
ads for chemical companies as propaganda if they ever become sentient,
that'll just be in a loop somewhere.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Well, we're going to take a quick break and when
we get back, we're going to kind of change gears
to friendship. So we are back, and you know, this
podcast we talk about a lot of grim stuff. We
talk about a lot of you know, animals eating animals,
plants eating animals, animals eating plants. But what about friendship?

(41:03):
Is their room for friendship? Absolutely yes, So I think
that sometimes the best defense is good friendship. And for plants,
this makes a lot of sense because they don't have jaws,
they don't have legs, they don't have arms, they can't
just like punch a goat in the face. So who
can protect them? Well, they can make friends with an

(41:28):
animal perhaps who has something in it for them, Right,
Like in most cases when you have a friendship between
one species and another, even if it crosses kingdoms, you
need to provide some benefit for the other. So some
plants will team up with ants who can protect their

(41:49):
new plant friend from herbivorous insects and even even herbivorous mammals.
So the deal works like this. So the plant will
offer the ant some tasty nectar, and so the ants
they're happy they have a good thing going here and
will defensively attack any insects trying to bite their sugar planty.

(42:13):
And basically the plants will pay the ants in nectar
maybe refuge in exchange for protection, which is you know,
I mean, it's a little bit like the ants are
a mafia, but it's also you know, kind of a
fun mafia situation.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Acute yeah, yeah, acute mafia. And that is such a
fascinating relationship because I mean, ants are intelligent, organized little insects,
at least at a sort of you know, population level,
a colony kind of works together, and I mean, it's
amazing what ants will do. But we see this a

(42:54):
lot on like acacia trees. We see it on mesquite trees,
which your native to Texas where I live. And so
you'll be walking around and you'll just see these trees
covered with ants, and the ants are going after these
extra floral nectaries which come out of leaves in different places,
and yeah, the plant pays them in in sugar water essentially.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, I love acacia trees actually, so like bullhorn Acacia trees,
which are found mostly in Central America, have definitely developed
a strong friendship with ants. So they attract ant queens
with their scent, and ant queen will take up residents.
Actually inside the it's called bullhorn because it has like

(43:40):
these two little like double horn thorns. They're not they're
not little thorns. They're like big gnarly horns like you
could you could die if you fall on one, but
they're actually hollow and inside of these horns the ants
can take up residents. And so it's like these little

(44:00):
barracks for all these ants to live in, and throughout
the tree there's all sorts of sets of these horns.
It's very metal to like house your army inside bullhorns
that are also very pointy and sharp and.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Stabby, giant hollow needles full of ants. That's a there's
another nightmare for you.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
And so these ants will protect the acacia bullhorn acacia,
and they will actually attack other plants that try to
grow over the acacia. So sometimes you have plants versus animals,
but sometimes you have plants versus plants like vines. Invasive
vines like the kudzu that you talked about, can be

(44:44):
bad news for a plant. It's actually sort of a
parasitic relationship because the vine will climb the plant, use
the plant as a structure to get sunlight, to get
more resources. Some plants actually like directly steal nutrients from
their host plant, so it's a bad situation. But the
ants will actually attack any vines trying to grow on

(45:08):
their beloved acacia tree. They will also sting herbivorous mammals
these huge things, right, Like, what can you do as
a plant against a big mammal trying to eat you. Well,
you got a little lant, buddy, and it's got a
very very painful sting, and it'll attack anything trying to
chomp down on it.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Yeah, just so fascinating. And I've always thought it's interesting
that ants will do that with aphids too. So on
the other side of this relationship, they'll protect a fids.
They farm aphids, which is the weirdest thing to think of.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
So cute I think it is. I mean, like it's
a little gross, right, because aphids like instead of melking them,
they sort of like squeeze out sugary substance called honeydew
from their butts and the ants slurp it up. But
you know, it's kind of cute. It's a little bit
cute because basically ants are farmers. They have these little

(46:03):
little a fids. They also farm scale insects. Those scale
insects are these peny tiny insects that look like little
barnacles almost. They're actually not great for plants or like
the Bulbornicacia, because they'll stick on to the leaves or
the you know, twigs, and they will suck out sap.

(46:23):
But the ants will actually milk the scale insects for
their honey, do that sugary substance and will protect the
scale insects. So it's kind of something where the ants
may be simultaneously protecting this tree but also doing a
little farming, and that farming of the scale insects isn't
great for the tree, but on average, the ants do

(46:44):
more benefit for the tree then they harm the tree,
So it works out.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah, industrious little things, aren't they.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yes, I like though that they you know, because farming,
you could do farming where you're protecting the land and
respet afecting your environment, which is not something that humans
often have in modern history. Were not great at that.
But you know, these little ants they've got it figured out.
They can farm on the tree but also protect the tree.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
It's very cool. I really love these relationships between the
plants and these ants. It's just it's like, I imagine them
having this beautiful friendship, this little ant society that loves
their tree. Uh. There was that movie about it. I
think it was called Avatar, and it was all about

(47:38):
the ant colony. But they were big and they were blue,
and they lived in a magical tree and yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
They controlled like sky dragons with their hair. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
Yeah, that was it was very accurate to the.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
World of ants. Yeah, I think it was a documentary.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Actually, Yeah, I do feel somewhat cheated out of getting
a really good ant movie that first of all, all
the ants that do anything are always dudes, which sucks,
it's not true. Yeah, and also like the just showing
ants at like a realistic movie showing them like farming

(48:17):
and cultivating and protecting trees, and that would be great.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Come on, guys, yeah, I would watch that. I want
to see that.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
I yes, see, you've already got two viewers, Hollywood, get
on that.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
That's all you need, right.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
I I completely agree. Well, is there anything else that
you want people to know about plants and how they
are not as helpless as we think?

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Oh gosh, so many things you know, from like we
were talking about different types of thorns and spines and
like physical defenses, and sometimes they combine the two. Sometimes
they fill their spines with ants. You know. I just
think that, you know, plants are nothing if not survivors
on this planet. They sort of form and I like

(49:09):
to think about it that plants are both at the
bottom end at the top of our food webs. You know,
they are food for, either directly or indirectly pretty much
all life on the planet. But then at the end
of the day, they're nutrient cyclers as well. They're just
really patient. As things break down in the soil, they
turn them into more plants, and you know, the cycle continues.

(49:32):
And I think that I like to say that plants
always win in the end, they just they just have
a lot of patients one way or the other.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
That seems menacing. It sounds like when the super plant
uprising that we have inadvertently bred with our herbicides.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
You're gonna be on they're ready for us.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
You're going to be on the plant side, Like are
you a plant? Are you a plant? Plant?

Speaker 2 (49:53):
You'll never know. I'll never tell, But no, I think
it's it's just for me. It's just such a cool
picture of you know, all these relations just we've been
talking about, plus so many more positive ones of you know,
how plants respond to different insects, both in a friendly
sort of way and in a defensive sort of way.
It it shows me pictures of things that are fascinating

(50:20):
and worth protecting and worth maintaining. So I think the
more people learn about how complicated these relationships are and
how susceptible they can be to you know, climate change
and things like that should be encouragement for us to
do better and keep finding new things and keep protecting
these things.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
I absolutely agree. I think that plants are sometimes overlooked
when we think about like protecting the environment, because a
panda bear that's really cute and cuddly, and we want
to protect it. A koala, Hey that's huggable. It's really not.
It would rip your face off, but we think it's
We think it's huggable.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
They look cuddly, they.

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Do cuddly until you hear them scream. But yeah, I
mean it is something I think that is really important
to you know, really appreciate plants as Hey, we would
not be here without plants at It's just what it
wouldn't happen. It's where we live, it's how we eat,
it's how we breathe, it's everything. And they're not They're

(51:23):
not just passively sitting there. They are actively adapting. They
have amazing adaptations. They respond to their environments. So even
though this podcast is typically animal themed, I am very
much pro plant and I will immediately surrender the plant uprising.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
Oh yeah no, I'm not fighting them. I'll just I'll
welcome our new overlords.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Well, on that note, before we go, we've got to
play a little game, and that game is called Gifts.
Who's Squawking the Mystery Animal Sound Game? Every week I
play a mystery animal sound and you the listener, and
you the gifts, try to guess who is making that sound.
Last week hint was this this little guy isn't happy

(52:07):
about being put in the discount beIN.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
I'm gonna be real bad at this.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
To be fair, I don't think I would get this
one if I hadn't, if I didn't do this myself.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Uh all right, I'm gonna guess, did you said discount Ben,
I'm gonna say, hamster.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
You're close, sort of close. This is actually budgets frog.
Congratulations to Auntie Bee, Joey P, and Violta F who
all guess correctly. It is a species of frog that
is often kept as a pet, and it is notable

(53:00):
or being a squat little guy who's very weird looking.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
I identify strongly with that squat little guy who's weird
looking now in my head because you said I was close.
Like hamsters are just amphibious frog or like frogs are
amphibious hamsters, Yeah, pretty much for me.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
I mean hamsters. They have these cheek pouches where they
can stick anything in their mouth indiscriminately, and frogs will
also put anything in their mouths indiscriminately. It's you know,
they could be friends if probably they didn't try like
eating each other, which I show. I imagine a frog
comes up to a hamster and is trying to get

(53:44):
that hamster into its mouth, while the hamster is trying
to get the frog into its mouth in sort of
a oraboros type fashion. But yeah, this is found in Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay.
But yeah, it is kept as pets, which you know,
I don't think this is the worst of the pets,

(54:08):
of the exotic pets, but I'm something of the opinion
that it's it's tricky. I think to keep a frog
make it happy. It's also called the Freddy Krueger frog.
I think that's because its skin is kind of pale
and it screams. I'm not really sure why it's called that,

(54:29):
how many people even call it that, or if it's
just like fans of the frog.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
See I'm having the oh wow, that is not what
I expected this guy to look like. It is Wednesday,
my dudes.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
It is the Wednesday my Dude's frog. Okay, okay, there
is a meme call it It's Wednesday, my dudes, and
it's a little frog saying it's Wednesday, my dudes. You
know Internet humor.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
I'm glad to know that this guy exists.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
But yeah, they will just pretty much eat anything they want.
They will. They're quite aggressive, thus the extremely shrill and
angry squeaking they will. They will puff themselves up. They
will eat other frogs if they can fit them in

(55:23):
their mouths. Pretty much anything that goes in their mouths
they will eat. Even as tadpoles. They will try to
eat each other. They're kind of baby cannibals, so that's fun.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Always love a baby cannibal. On to this week's mystery
animal sound. This hollering little fella may not sniff so
many butts, but it does love digging. Hello, so it
is not the man saying hello, good morning.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
That's Carl.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
That's Carl. Hi, Carl, thanks for writing all those deadly
nightshade plans for us. Do you have any guesses?

Speaker 2 (56:10):
I think I actually know what this is. I think
that is a praank.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to bleep
out your answers so our listeners can't cheat, but they
will know that you guess correctly. Congratulations, it's as I
think you know who was making that adorable little You
can write to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail

(56:35):
dot com uh, doctor Boliga, where can people find you?
You were so lovely to have on the show.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Oh it was so much fun. I really enjoyed this.
I am all over the internet for better or worse.
You can find me at the Plant prof on Instagram, Twitter,
or TikTok, and you can also find my podcast Planthropology
on Instagram, in Twitter and Facebook.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
I try so hard to avoid TikTok, but I have
to admit your plant videos are one of the only
things I do not avoid that I must consume. I
love I love them so much. I also love the
debunking of DIY plants. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
I will never know case on the internet.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
So you mean, if like I hack up a plant
and then shove that plant inside a banana peel, I
won't get a beautiful bush.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
You know you'll get something probably fruitflies.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Well at least I'm growing somebody. Well, thank you so
much for joining me today, and thank you so much
for listening. And hey, thanks to the Space Classics for
their super awesome song Exo Lumina. Creature features a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard,
visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Or Hey guess what.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
Wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I don't judge you.
See you next Wednesday. M