Ologies with Alie Ward - Pteridology (FERNS) with Fay-Wei Li

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Fronds. Forest dwellers. Spores. Houseplants. Queer icons. We’ve got ferns. The charming and hilarious professor and author of “Ferns: Lessons in Survival from Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants,” Dr. Fay-Wei Li, tells me all about fern evolution, what ferns not to have in your house, the most expensive ferns, the tastiest ferns, mathematical mysteries, and a genome that makes no sense, to me or a lot of Pteridologists. Also, can Between Two Ferns save science? This episode is, in Fay-Wei’s words, “ferntastic.”Visit Dr. Li’s lab website and follow him on Google ScholarBuy his book, Ferns: Lessons in Survival from Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants, on Bookshop.org or AmazonA donation went to the ASPT Herbarium Emergency FundMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Bryology (MOSS), Domestic Phytology (HOUSEPLANTS), Neuroendocrinology (SEX & GENDER), Paleontology (DINOSAURS), Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS, Ethnoecology (ETHNOBOTANY/NATIVE PLANTS), Dendrology (TREES), Myrmecology (ANTS), Forest Entomology (CREEPY CRAWLIES)400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topicSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hey, it's your old roommate who always found the best furniture on the side of the road, Allie Ward. Did you know that you love ferns? Not yet. Sit tight. You're about to. I'm going to tell you one person who loves ferns. It's this guest. In fact, I first saw this ologist in this quick video about ferns, and they were wearing a shirt that said, I heart ferns, but the heart was a fern gametea fight. You're going to find out everything about that later. And they said that ferns were fern-tastic. This is in the first five seconds of the video, and I was like, they're on and they wrote the 2025 book ferns lessons in survival from the earth's most adaptable plants and they're an associate professor at cornell's boyce thompson institute they got their

phd in ferns at duke university where they're also a scholar in residence and we'll talk about their stories and their history and their deep love of ferns in a moment but first thank you to everyone who supports the show via patreon.com slash ologies or you can join for a dollar a month and you can leave questions for the ologists ahead of time. Thank you to everyone out there in ologiesmerch via ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which helps so much, such as this recent one from P.T. Bunch, who said that Ologies makes me happy to be alive in an infinitely interesting world with infinitely curious ologists. P.T., happy to have it here. And Blue Dot Rose, happy to have you and your sister here in spirit. Okay. Thank you also to

sponsors of Ologies, who for years have made it possible for us to donate. to a cause or two each week. Okay, let's jump into terrodology. So the pater comes from the Greek word for a wing or a feather. So like teradactal or helicopter, helico, which means spiral and pater, which means wings. So if you didn't know, yeah, the pater in helicopter is its own word in there. It's weird. But ferns, they look feathery.

So people who study them are officially on record as. terrodologists. And so let's illuminate the shadowy world of ferns to hear about their long evolution. What ferns not to have in your house, icons to fern scientists, haploid, diploid, spore packets. Do they have roots? How ferns can teach us about sexual identity, the most expensive ferns, the tastiest ferns, the trendiest ferns, mathematical mysteries, and a genome that makes no sense, to me at least, with the absolutely charming, enthusiastic scholar. professor, researcher, fern advocate, and terrodologist, Dr. Faye Wai Lee. Faye Wally, he him.

Where are you right now? I'm right now in North Carolina. I'm actually in the process of moving my lap to Duke University. Does North Carolina have good ferns? I feel like I don't even know if North Carolina has ferns. Yeah, I mean, North America in general is not a great place to find ferns. The most exciting place in North America to find ferns is in the desert. What? No.

Yeah, yeah. Arizona, for example, has one of the highest fern diversity. I thought ferns needed a lot of darkness and water, and those are like two things Arizona does not have. out. Well, so they have what we call a calumphoid ferns. They are desert ferns. They adapted to this really dry environment and they really took advantage of it and took off. They diversify so much diversity there. What do they look like? Usually they look really crispy. They can lose their water up to 90% and they can still come back alive. So if you, for example, have a hike in a desert in Arizona,

Texas, whatever, you see some crispy ferns, put them the Ziplot back or pour some water over it. They may come back, just green it up. Oh, my gosh. Does moss do that as well? Can't moss, like, dehydrate and rehydrate a lot? Yeah, yeah. In many ways, they're like mosses. They had resurrection ferns.

They look dead, but then they still can come back. Well, what a name. What a compelling name, like zombie coming back from the dead. When I think of a fern, I think of these dark forests and I think of like deep gullies and streams and wetness and stuff. But what exactly is a fern? Like they're a plant, but they're not like normal plants, right? Not like the plants we're used to? Yeah, I mean, there are many ways to define our ferns.

You can define it by looking at what they doesn't have. They don't have seeds. They don't produce flowers. But the most definitive way to define a fern is their sun. sex life. Let me hear it. Okay. Well, they don't have flowers, right?

And flowers is where the sex happens. The sperm will fertilize an egg as you have the next generations. Friends don't have flowers. And the funnier friends you see outside, there are diploids. They have two set of chromosomes, like flying plants and humans, for example. But they have this entirely different generations that we call the gamutophyte phase. And the gamutophy is a haploid. So diploid, de, two, means two kinds.

copies of a gene and haploid means one copy. Most of your cells are diploid, but gamete cells like sperm and egg are haploid because they're going to hook up with each other. So ferns have this stage, gametophytes, which means like a sexy plant. And it's easy to remember because gametophytes typically look like little green hearts or sometimes they look like an oven mitt, which I guess is sexy depending on who, where the person is wearing the oven mitt. But yeah, comediphytes, structures of sexual independence. And that independent, they live outside of the deploy ferns, that green. They usually super tiny, smaller than your fingernails, for example.

And this is where the sex happens in ferns, not in the flowers, but in a gamutophy phase. And does that come out as the spores that you see that powdery brown stuff on the back of the leaves? Right, exactly. So the spores were germinate into gamutophytes, and again, gamutophytes, three living. They will produce ag and spurns, and they were fertilized, and it become a zygote, and a zygote will become, you know, the ferny ferns you see outside. So they basically have two independent generations, the haploid phase and the diploid phase. And is this an older type of reproduction, or is it just divergent evolution, or is this something

that's kind of ancestral? Only in ferns you have these two separate generations living independent with each other. And that's what make them unique. That exactly defines a fern. What is their basic anatomy? Do they have a rhizome or do they have roots if you had to like give the basic parts of a fern? Okay. So I guess the tax with ferns will have a horizontal rhizome.

And the rhizome we can think about is a stem. And then you have leaf, which is a fern fronds coming out. And then beneath it, you have the roots. So a rhizome, a stem, roots coming down, and the leaf coming out. Okay. That's a basic principle there. And the roots are true roots. They are not like a prophylified roots, which is rhizzoids.

Oh, okay. So that's a misconception that they don't have roots. They have proper vasculatures in their root system. Nice. So yes, ferns have roots, but they also have rhizomes that act like a stem, but they look kind of like a clumpy knob at the basis. the fronds. And then below the rhizome, you have the actual roots of the plant. Obviously, with over 10,000 species of ferns, we're not going to discuss every fern. But we can get the

broad strokes, especially between the mossy or bryophyte-looking little gametophytes, which are tiny, and the frond-looking adult sporophytes. I love also that you call them mossy-mosses and ferny ferns to get an idea of what they look like. And the firm gamutophytes, where the haplophates, they do look in many ways like a browophytes. And we had a great episode about Moss a few years ago, and I'd never considered what their life cycle was like or how rich in diversity they are and how you can go up close to one and just see so much that you would overlook unless you had a loop and stuff. But have you always been like a plant person or did you get into this via the spore angle or what made it so that you are an expert? in, you're a terrodologist.

I'm a terrodologist. Yes, yes. So I grew up in Taiwan. There's just so many fern diversity in Taiwan. So to put it into perspective, Taiwan has 800 fern species. Taiwan is like a third of, the third size of New York State.

The whole North America has only 400 species. So this tiny alien has double a fern diversity compared to USA. And so I just got really fascinated about the diversity of friends. My parents have a little cabin in the woods, and I spent a lot of time in the forest looking around and just realized there are so many of them. And I just wanted to identify them, learn more about them, and that's how I become hooked with firms.

Did your parents get you plant books and would you come back to the house with all these plants? They did. They gave me many field guides, and that's, yeah. I feel like with ferns, there is something really beautiful about doing spore pressings and, like, the preservation. Do you find when you're doing this research, do you have to go back in archives to see specimens that were collected a long time ago that are pressed? How are you even researching and cataloging them? Yeah, we use herbarium a lot. So herbarian is like a library of dead plants. It's really a magical place.

So it's a place you basically have physical plant materials from around the world and from different plane lineages and you just go to different cabinets and you can pull them out, can look at them very closely. And so we spent a lot of time in herbarium looking for characters, trying to identify different species of ferns. We also were able to find some new species just by looking at the old herbarian specimens. No. How do you tell? Are you able to take a little fragment of it and do any DNA now on it to... Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's the beauty of herbarian specimens. They preserve so much information.

The DNA you can get, or we can get DNA from specimens as over 100 years old specimens. And they have the locality. We know where they come from. They have the spores, right? We can look at the spore mythology. So, yeah, Haberam is very important for botanical research. In the past, we have discovered several new species. So before you discover something new, right, you got a chance to name it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one time we discovered a new genus, and my advisor and I would decide to name it after Lady Gaga. So the genus is called Gaga.

No. Yeah. That's amazing. Was your advisor, a Lady Gaga fan? Or did you know that this is a good move for ferns? she's a deep lady gaga fans that the two things we talk about when i was a graduate student is her cat and lady gaga's newest album did lady gaga ever find out about that yes she was interviewed several times and people asked her about the gaga friends and yeah she acknowledged this

and the gaga friends would describe they have a really odd reproductive methods and they bypass a lot of sexual reproductions. And so later got made a comment about the Gaga Fern saying they are sexless. And one of the researchers spearheading this 2012 naming was Dr. Kathleen prior, who was inspired in part by this sequined, light, seafoomy green, and heart-shaped body suit that the pop star had performed in. And also the DNA of this genus of 19 different ferns has some repeating pairs of G.A. GAGA. And Dr. Pryor also said that the naming was in honor of Lady Gaga's, quote, fervent defense of equality and individual expression and that they think her second album born this way is enormously empowering, especially for disenfranchised people in communities like

LGBTQ, ethnic groups, women, and she added scientists who study odd ferns. And while Lady Gaga has identified as bisexual. She's also been quick to note that she doesn't represent the LGBTQ plus community and just speaks up for equity and freedom of sexual expression. And there were also earlier in her career rumors of her being trans and her response was usually along the lines of so what if I were. So Fern comitifites make male and female sex cells proof that nature is not on a binary. And so now you're saying that they have kind of like a sexless reproduction. But I'm wondering, like, because the spores always get me with ferns, I think that's one of the things that's most interesting. When you are, like, looking at spores, say, under a microscope, do they have a lot of different morphologies that determine what happens in their different, like, diploid and haploid phases?

Or is a spore, is a spore, is a spore? Do they all look the same? Spores contain a lot of information. Different species, different genera have really different ornamentations. Sometimes I have pores on the small walls, and those are very important characters. And the size are important, too. Many ferns like to become a polyploid, so they duplicate their genomes pretty often. So I have four copies of chromosomes.

Many of them even have 12 copies of chromosomes. And when they do that, their spores become very big. So we can measure the spore size as a proxy of how many set of chromosomes they have in a genome. So to recap, those little bumps on the underside of a fern leaf, those are called sorri. And each one has little orbs, which in turn house the spores. And when the time is right, the spores pop out like someone from a giant birthday cake, and they find a wet spot to germinate into that gametophyte with little root-like rhizoids. And these can make the haploid sperm or eggs.

And when a sperm finds an egg through a film of water, then you get the diploid parts of the life cycle as the fern leaves begin to sprout and grow. The gametophyte shrivels up at the base. As that fern plant begins to grow up, the cycle starts again. But yes, chromosomes in ferns, it turns out, can be wild. And do people who are researching ferns, such as yourself and your lab, are you going about it from that genomics? Are you in it for the chromosomes and the reproduction cycle?

or are a lot of pterodologists in conservation and taxonomy of it? What makes a fern person kind of come alive with the research? Yeah, so in the past, we've done many different aspects of fern biology. We've done some taxonomy, we describe species, looking at how those different species relate to each other. And nowadays, we focus a lot on their genomic side. You know, ferns are weird. There's a fern species called Ophioglossum, retic glottom. It has 1,400 chromosomes.

What? So humans have 46, right? What? And then this guy has 1,400 chromosomes. And just, why? Why do I do that? And their genomes are huge as well. So, you know, DNA is composed of ATGC, right, four different letters.

And humans, for example, have like three billions of different letters. So most humans have 46 chromosomes, 23 pairs. and each chromosome in humans can have up to 300 million base pairs. And the base pairs are the rungs of that spiral ladder of DNA. And A pairs with T, C, pairs with G. So our genome contains over 3 billion base pairs of those letters. But this first species has 160 billion letters, like a lot bigger than a human genome.

Why? Right. And that's something I want to figure out. How do I do this? So unraveling that DNA mystery, that's in the future of ferns. But what about tales of ferns past? Were they one of the earlier plants? When we see drawings of like dinosaurs surrounded by ferns, is that pretty accurate? Did they predate flowers by a lot? Like flowering plants? Well, yes, I know. So ferns are both really old and also really young. Tell me everything you know. They are old in a sense.

You can trace the whole lineage back to company forests like 300 million years ago. And that is the time that ferns really dominated Earth. The colds were burning now are coming from ferns and the ancient relatives. So you can think about ferns that are fueling the civilizations of human beings. Wow. Anyway, so they dominate Earth. And then in Cretaceous, like 100 million years ago, flying plants come. alone. And they are bad. They are bullies. They push ferns out. So they become the dominant

actors of the forest and ferns have to figure out what they do next. So they went understory and they kind of staging a comeback when they were understory and they adapt to a really low-line environments and they flourished and they diversify in the low-line environment. So most of the fern species, most of our foreign lineage we see today are actually really young. Yeah, younger than the flowering plants. Oh, because they had to adapt to it. Exactly. We call them the diversifying the shadow of angiosperms, in the shadow of flowering plants.

Wow. Yeah, so they're young. I had no idea. I always thought that they had been around forever and it must have just been darker then, which is not right. You are wrong. So ferns themselves have been on earth for 400 million years, but they have adapted to temperature fluctuations and they've kind of rebranded as understory, low light. champions in some cases once the angiosperms or the flowering plants came in and ruined their whole vibe. Do you get a chance to go back to Taiwan and are you just like ferns, ferns, ferns, ferns.

Do you go back and you're just like, ah, finally. So good ass ferns. Yeah, yeah. Every time the sheer number of species just blew me away again and again, walking the little trial, you see a hundred of species. It's fantastic. One thing I miss a lot in Taiwan is the food and you can find fetal heads in Taiwan and then people cook it and it's pretty common and they're really, really delicious. What's the best way to eat a fiddlehead? Okay. I guess I need to clarify. So not all fetal heads are edible. Some are all right toxic and carcinogenic. In eastern U.S., you'll In the spring, you will go out and pick fetal heads, right? So just make sure that you pick the right ones.

Don't pick the toxic one. But the fetal heads we eat in the U.S., for example, is the species called Matsucia, the common name is ostrichs friends. And the best way to cook it, I think, is first you need to blanch them. They are very tanning, a lot of tanning, and you just want to get rid of them. And then I will add some butter, some food. fiddle has some shrimps, some pasta together, mix it up. It's good. It's crunchy, but also a bit slimy. So it's like really interesting balance that I really like. Kind of like okra, like a little bit.

Have you ever had okra? Ocara is too slimy, but I think the crunchy bit is better. Do a lot of animals go out munching on fiddleheads? Who eats ferns in terms of like evolution? The ferns are famous for not being eaten. Really? So I mentioned some fetal heads. Some ferns are toxic, right? And they are toxic for reasons. They don't want to be eaten.

Furns are also very famous for having very little herbivory. What does that mean? Don't get eaten. Very little insect eat them. Oh, okay. So if you go out, right again, go on a hike, look at all the firm fronts. They're usually intact.

And if you look at the flowering plants, The summer's got chewed up pretty badly. And so the comparisons, the contrast is pretty striking. And the really cool thing about this is you can take advantage of this. So there's a big sea company called Coteba. They produce a lot of corns and soybeans in the U.S. And they got really interesting in ferns because they realized no one eat ferns, but why? Right.

And so they develop a sophisticated screening pipeline. So they're able to identify a number of insect cytoproteins from ferns. And they were able to put this in corns. And the near generation of corn is super resistance to a lot of like foam army worms and so on. So probably in the future, maybe the corns you are eating has a bit of fern DNA in it. Like kind of transgenic. Yeah. Kind of.

So you're eating a little bit of fern DNA, which then, Does that mean that they can use fewer insecticides and pesticides on it? That's the whole point. Wow. I mean, you'd think ferns have so many genes to spare, you know? They have so many extra. Some of them. They're like, take a couple.

We're fine. You guys have 46. We're fine. Yeah. What about when it comes to ferns in the media? Ferngoly, land before time. Have you seen either of these? Do you ever notice ferns in like animation and you go,

that fern wouldn't be there to be honest i've heard about those movies but never watched them i didn't grew up in the u.s right so yeah but um between two ferns that's i guess that's the the one i know between two ferns i'm your host keanu reep i'm your host sat aliphonacus and my guest today is keanu reeves thank you for being here thanks for having me here on a scale of one to a hundred how many words do you know one to a hundred But do you know 50 words? Do you know 75 words? They're funny as hell.

So the ferns in between two ferns, the two ferns that are set to be on the size. They are nephalippis cordifolia. So the common end of it is Boston ferns. Or sometimes called the sword ferns. And Boston ferns are kind of, they are the most widely cultivated ferns in the entire world. It's so popular.

And the origins of Boston ferns, it's a bit unclear, but it was hypothesized that there was a shipment of ferns from Europe in the late 19th centuries. And that shipment contains a lot of really weird variety of Boston ferns. And some of them are strupy, some of them are highly dissected, some are crested. And a forest picked them up, and I guess a new house plant sensation was born. And in the early 20th century, there was a report saying Boston friends, there's over a million Boston friends being sold and grown in just the eastern side of the U.S. alone.

So that was an extremely popular friend back then. I guess it's still pretty popular now. Are they hard to take care of? I mean, maybe perhaps not. So I started ferns by killing them. Okay. I cannot grow furnishing the house. But my wife just couldn't understand

what a fern doctor keeps killing her ferns. You're not uncomfortable with dead plants, obviously, because you're around a lot. So there you go. It's like you understand the value of a dead plant also. A lot of people see a dead plant. dead plant and they say, oh no, this is a tragedy, but you say, this is an opportunity to catalog it.

If I'm good at it, I could make a lot of money. So I don't know if you've seen the staghorn ferns. So they're called staghorn ferns because they look kind of lobe, like reindeer antlers or a very large frisade salad. And colonies of staghorn ferns in the wild can divide labor with the upper fronds getting waxy and directing rainwater downward to spongier staghorns below it. But not in the wild. Staghorns are the buzz of the plant world. There was a better home in gardens article from August, and it gossiped that it's hard to find a plant as controversial as a staghorn fern. It continued,

while some adore its sculptural antler-like fronds, others shy away from its prehistoric aesthetic. A recent glimpse into the terrace of Martha Stewart revealed a hanging staghorn. fern as the ultimate natural statement piece, center stage. So stag horns, the fern du jour. It's getting really popular in Asia. So they usually are mounted on the wooden plaque, and they have the angela-shaped leaf coming out. So it really like a deer mounted on the wall.

I guess in Etsy you can get them for like 20 bucks. But recently in Taiwan, there was a new variety of stagron firms that was sold over $300,000 U.S. dollars. No. So there's a total stack home of firm craze fever in some part of Asian countries right now. So if I'm good at this, I mean, I can make serious money. You can retire early. But I'm not.

You can just volunteer at the lab. Just do it for the love of burns. but just like from a yacht. Are ferns getting kind of a comeback or are there people who are just like die hard? Like I'm a fern person and not an angiosporophile. Do ferns have their like street team that loves them? Yeah.

So there's an American friend society and I'm currently the president-elect of that society. It's so fun to be around with firm people. I mean, in a botanical world, the firm people have the reputations of being really rowdy and just like all stick to each other. That's so cool. You know, I almost named our dog fern.

I love the name fern. Have you ever met anyone who's named fern? Is that a great name? It was, yeah. I mean, we have a daughter and then I propose to my wife, Maybe we should admit them, her ferns. But then because I also been killing a lot of ferns in the house, so she doesn't feel it's a good idea.

She's like, we'll name her Maggie. We'll name her anything. Anything. Daisy, something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something cannot be killed. What about, you know, speaking of dead ferns, like how are they doing out there? Yeah, it's a serious issues.

There are a lot of endangered fern species. to give you an example there's um or Halloween just passed but if you walk around south and florida and you'll be very lucky to see a spooky green hand coming out from a palm trees and those are like caraglassa palmata it's a very endangered fern species in florida and it looks just like a hand stangling down super cool it's one of the reasons they got so in dangers because over collections, because it looks so weird, people want to collect them and then grow them. It just doesn't grow well outside of the native habitats. And obviously, the disconstructions of the swamps, the drainage of swams also didn't help.

Is there a way to try to cultivate those and reintroduce them, or is that just really, really hard to do? There are some progress. So in upstate New York, there's a very endangered species called Asplandium scolopendium. And this is a very common commercially available firm species. But those are coming from Europe. So Europe have a different subspecies. And the American subspecies is extremely endangered. But anyway, there's been some process of reintroducing the Native American ones to the habitat.

And one 2017 thesis I read titled, experimental reintroduction of American Heart's Tongue Fern, factors affecting successful establishment of transplants. Noted that the reintroduction success varied based on partly how robust and little ferns were at the time of transplantation and in the higher humidity sites, they tended to fare better. And I looked up a 2025 paper and it seemed to find that while still threatened in their native northeast habitats, the transplant efforts have been working. So, ray for combating issues that we have caused. Obviously, every year ecology changes more and more. And it's interesting to think how much, you know, one type of plant can tell you about what's going

on in the environment, you know, as a whole. And we have some questions from listeners. Can I ask you? Yeah. Yeah? Okay. They have great questions better than mine. And we will get to your questions, patrons in a moment. But first, let's donate to a cause of the ologist who And this week, it's going to the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, which promotes research and teaching of taxonomy, systematics, and phylogeny of vascular and nonvascular plants. And they provide early career BIPOC research grant funds, graduate student research grant funds, and more, plus more resources. And it's a pleasure to support them on behalf of Dr. Lee and on behalf of Ferns the world over. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, if you would like to ask a question of the ologist before we record, you can hop on over to patreon.com slash ologies, where you can join for as little as $1 a month. And let's enter the overgrown forest of your questions. And let's see. On the topic of cultivation, we were just talking about that. Gull next door, Ashley doing Empress of Smallwood and Mish the Fish wanted to know. Goal next door said, I've tried to collect spores and grow them to absolutely no avail.

Is this a losing battle or is it a skill issue? How can I grow myself a fern forest? And the Empress of Smallwood wanted to know, can you collect fern spores to germinate more spores, more ferns? Someone else asked what they could do to prevent their native ferns from spreading through the rest of the garden. But that, I imagine, just like, you've got to pluck them. The father of Mish the fish looking at you and your ferns.

If you want a fern golly, can you? you try to make one? Yeah, and so to germany in the spores, you really want them to be on a really wet surface. So it can use a delicate container with some pea moss maybe and some really moist soil, and then you can sprinkle the ferns on top of them and keep the lid on.

So the whole environment is really humid. And hopefully, I can get you some little fern gamutophytes. So you'll see the fern gamutophytes. So you'll see the fern gamutify first. So those are like mossy things coming out from the grounds. They would not look like a ferns in the beginning. You'll be looking at like really filmy green sheets on the soil. But some ferns have green spores.

Like the matusias, the ostrich firms, they have green spores, which means that they have really bad shelf life. So if you want to collect the spores, you better germinate them right away. Just don't put them in the room temperature for too long. will go bad. So do you kind of have to figure out which species you've got and then learn what works best for that species? Is it vary a little bit? Definitely. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, on the topic of those gamutaphites. Hi, this is Tommy and McElrath. We want to know why ferns have done so well and lasted so long evolutionarily over the years. We're from

Chattanooga, Tennessee. And many more of you, including Jenna, Maddie, A. Good Soup, Moth, Katie Munos, Brennan-Hale Bar, Amy Arugula, Clemens V, Redhead Scientist, and Matt Schmidt from Wellington, New Zealand, wanted to know what or how gametophytes give ferns a leg up in sexual reproduction. Thanks. What is it about them that has led to their survival? That's a great question. So, fern spores can fly away really far, can fly really far away, right? And then imagine you are a single spore just by yourself, and you landed in a remote island, and there's no one else there. And a spore will germinate into a gamutophyte.

And the gamutrophytes are typically hermaphroditic, so they have both male and female parts. So you can just self-fertilize yourself, and you become a new friend. You don't need another partner because a single spore can colonize the whole island. And that, in a sense, give them a lack of. Is there an issue then with whatever that reproduces, reproducing with itself? Does it become kind of cloned or is there like an issue with genetics? Oh, yeah. It creates a lot of issues.

Okay. Because you self-fertilized, where you lose all the genetic diversity that way, the hydrozygosity that way. So you're completely homozygous. There's no diversity in your genome. Every single locusts, they are same. So imagine an unrelated egg meets a stranger's fern sperm, and you've got a lot of variation, a lot of combos happening because they're heterozygous. They're different. Now, if you're mixing with your own DNA, homozygous, you might have some weak spots where your haploid gamutified DNA is doubling up with itself in the diploid phase. Also, good job for knowing what all those terms mean. Look at how far we've come. So that's problematic in the long run.

But if you want to just colonize somewhere really fast, you got it. Gets the job done. Yeah. And Matt Schmidt was from New Zealand. Have you been to New Zealand? No. Me neither. It's a great place to look at ferns.

They have so many cool friends in New Zealand. That was my next question. Andy Pepper, Ziz, Sarah Manns, Fiona Roji, Adi Capello, all these people asked about New Zealand and ferns. Ziz said, I'm so excited. OMG, as a Kiwi, why do New Zealand forests have so much silver fern when I've never even heard of tree ferns anywhere else? Sarah said, please talk about New Zealand ferns. And then also, Adi Capella wanted to know culture-wise, like they've spent time in New Zealand and says that there's a lot of ferns integrated into the culture there. And so what is it about New Zealand? Why is their fern game so strong?

I wish I would work in New Zealand as a firm biologist. You know, solar ferns, right? It's everywhere. It's on the national, the area of New Zealand has ferns on them. The rock big teams have the fern leave on the jersey. It's amazing. And according to the Museum of New Zealand, yes, ferns are a big deal. They're on military tombstones. They're on sports uniforms, coats of arms, currency. And though I have never been to New Zealand, I imagine they're everywhere in like cool murals and bus stops and clip art and everything. Now, of particular acclaim are the black fern and the silver fern.

The latter called pongo to Maori folks, which is native only to New Zealand and which can grow into this hairy kind of scaly tree trunk several stories tall. And New Zealand, it's just lousy with ferns. ferns everywhere in the best way. Does New Zealand just have, like, great habitat for ferns? Yes. And also they have really odd ferns. I guess probably because it was isolated a bit from the rest of the world. Some weird ferns, you know, really appears in that place. And so kind of like what you were saying, if a spore lands on an island turns into a gamutify, then they can just colonize, they can just boom.

So if they're in this sort of remote location, then you might just get all kinds of evolution from that. Yeah, exactly. They kind of adapt to the virus-specific habitats and have interesting morphology. What about invasive ones? Reese Perini, Justin Bowen, Valby listening, Lisa Gorman, potato puffer, and Earl of Gramelekin wanted to know, in Reese's words, are there invasive ferns? And I know we mentioned earlier that that person's dad was like, how do I get rid of some of the names? native ferns take it over my garden. Because they're so good at that reproduction, are they ever like, whoa, we got too many of this fern here? There are several really nasty

ferns. So there's one species called like Golden Microphilum. Native in Asia, but in Florida is culling forest. Man, this is weird fern. So it's a climbing fern. So they wrap around trees and they go up. And a single leaf, the whole thing is a single leaf. So they have the longest leaf on this planet because that whole thing is a single leaf. And they go up the trees and they strangle the trees. Oh. Each front of this old world climbing fern, which can smother whatever was growing underneath its canopy, can be 125 feet long. South Florida hates these things. So, yeah, it's a horrible ferns. But in their native habitats, they are well-behaved,

just for some reasons when they arrive, Florida, they went well. Spring bright. So that's one. There's another fern species called Salvina molasta. I guess as a name implying molasta is not a good fern. This is aquatic ferns that floats on top of water. Oh, wow. It's native in Brazil, and it has caused trillions of the,

of damage around the world in Australia and Africa, it just blocked the waterways. It can just cover the entire lake and then choke whatever's fish down there. It's a serious problem. Some ferns are not nice. Some ferns are like, that's it. I'm taking over. This is my tree now in Florida. Florida has some issues with pythons and all kinds of stuff.

It's wild down there. Florida is just its own science experiment in terms of what's going on down there. Well, but there are some weedy ferns that kind of maybe can save the Earth a bit. So there's a fern called Azola. It's also aquatic ferns. They float. Around 50 million years ago, you know, Earth was a much warmer place. And the Arctic was actually a big freshwater lake.

And there was a huge Azula bloom. during that time. And the geologists estimated that during that azola bloom, that firm bloom in the Arctic water, they secreted over 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. And that was hypothesized to facilitate the Earth transition from that warmer climates to a now cooler environment, right? Now the Arctic is frozen mostly. For now.

So, yeah, they have played a big role. Their weediness have played a big role in Earth geologists. historical history. You mentioned something about the fern that can climb trees and tree climbing ferns and a bunch of people, Cynthia B. Ellis Sugarman, Earl of Grahamelkin, Mads, first time question asked her J-Mo and Cynthia Z. Cynthia Z, all caps. All caps, three exclamation points. Please tell me more about ant ferns. I fell in love instantly with leconopterous genus. Lecannopterus, yeah. Currently grow a few species. How did they co-oomopterus? How did they co-oomptorous? evolve with ants. Can they substitute the role of ants with fertilizer? Do they host bugs other than

ants? Mads wanted to know do ferns have a symbiotic relationship with other animals or plants? So, you know, we're talking about some ferns live on trees as symbionts, others working with ant alliances. What's going on? First, let's talk about ant ferns because I have no idea what Cynthia is talking about. Yeah. So like an option is that dimensions have a really interesting in rhizome structures. So usually rhizome is really like a thing, like a pencil, right? Running on the grounds or running on trees. But the rhizome of end ferns, like an optress, it's like a maze.

It's like a balloon and has chambers. They have different places. And the ants will live inside the rhizomes. And so ferns are providing a really comfy place for ants to live. And the ant's job is to protect the ferns. So if there's any aphist, some other insects want to eat the ferns, the ants will fight them off. So it's some of our symbiotic interactions. And the cool thing about this is this evolved multiple times in fern's evolutionary histories.

There's another fern genus called solanopterys. So solanopterous selenum, the rhizome like a tomato, size like a tomato. And again, similar things. The ants will chew into the big rhizome. and they live inside the right zones. Again, for protections. That's so cool. It's like a condo.

Yeah, exactly. And some ferns have nectar, so they have either a very special, like nectar structures, or sometimes just sequit, really sugary liquids. Again, they're enticing ants to come over, and hoping they will be their bodyguard.

I need you here. And then in terms of other plants that they like to live with, do climbing ferns benefit some trees. Are there other plants that like to grow near ferns because they do a certain thing to the soil? Do ferns have friends, I guess? Oh, yeah, they have friends. So in the neotropics, right, in Central America or South America, you have bromeliads, the big pineapple things on the trees, right? The pineapple things, they kind of like upside down hats and they will collect a lot of

leaders. So those are in the neotropics. In Asian tropics, you have the bird nest ferns. They look kind of similar. They have big leaves and the overlapping leaves, so they collect a lot of leaf leaders on the trees. And because of that, some frogs like to live specifically on those burn nest ferns. And a lot of insects like to live in that habitats. Orchids also like to hang him down from those burnet ferns.

And as the Azola ferns, I mentioned, the one that it cooled on the earth, they have a very specific cyanobacteria that live inside of them. So the cyanobactera, the phyllosynthetic centerbacteria, they can fix nitrogen, meaning they can turn nitrogen gas into ammonia. And only a few bacteria can do that. And essentially, azola ferns have their own fertilizers. So they carry their symbiotics bacteria with them. They can live in a really low nitrogen environment. And the Asian farmers have figured out how to use this. So before they plant the rice, they will flots the rice patties, and they will put azola there.

And the Zola will grow, and they will fix nitrogen fuel their symbiotics and the bacteria. And they will drain the water, and the azola will come down to the soil, and it will decompose, release all the fixed nitrogen and they'll plant the rice. So this is a very clever way to boost the productivity. It's like its own plant fertilizer. Thanks for that. It's like miracle grow or something

but at bigger scale. What about size? Like Mouse Paxton, Marissa Jacobson, Reese Perini, Ranger France, Jenna Congdon, Lunar Crumpet, Sustainable Sirenian, Amelia de Hoff, Jamie B, all these people wanted to know about giant ferns. Amelia DeHawf, are giant ferns a newer development than the rest of our fern species?

Are they an OG when it comes to size? Like, what's up with giant ones? The biggest one, I think, would be the tree ferns. Oh, okay. The sulfur ferns in New Zealand, those are tree ferns. They have tree ferns, which is awesome. And the trunk of those tree ferns, they don't have woods, so they don't produce any woods at all.

The thing you see on the trunk is actually roots. So imagine a friend growing up And when they're growing up The apex will actually shoot down roots from the top And the roots will serve as a support structures And that's how the tree trunk is made in tree farms It's mostly just roots Oh wow

The stem itself is not actually very big And those roots are really strong roots They're just not the wimpy roots You see They're reinforced roots with lots of fibers in them. What about, let's see, fractal pattern, M. Rothamel, Paulinatar, Kali Bell, Claire Rishi, wanted to know, Claire says, fern math, Fibonacci sequence, Barnsley Firm, why are these

plants so mathematical? And yeah, why do ferns M wanted to know embody fractal patterns? What's going on there? Gosh, this is a question I don't know how to answer. There was a paper exactly. about this. It's a paper by Sandy Hetherington from Edinburgh. They have a beautiful paper about the mathematics and math and fossil ferns. And for more on this, you can see the 2025 paper. Identification of a tetrahedral apical cell preserved within a fossilized fern fiddlehead, where doctors Raphael Cruz and Sandy Hetherington looked at a 315 million-year-old fern fossil, and they concluded that fiddleheads have been around for a long.

long time and that fern leaves evolved through the modification of shoots. And the spirals in nature may have evolved simply because it's a very efficient packing method. So think about that next time you organize your sock drawer. Also, if you're a fractophile and you can't get enough of the seemingly infinite repeating patterns of fern leaves, I would like to direct you to the 1988 book, Fractals Everywhere, by a mathematician named Michael Barnsley, who has a fractal named after him. And it's also named after a fern. It's the Barnsley fern fractal. And models of it look like a fern leaf. But if you're a terrodologist, you would say best resembles a black spleen wart naturally. Also, I know that approximately all percent of you are listening, just waiting to

find out why your fern is dead. Maybe you're Dr. Lee's wife. So me not being a terrodologist or even an owner of a single fern did spend some time asking the internet why you some ducked ferns. And I gathered the following tips. So ferns like humidity. So keep them in a bathroom with a window, but not in a bathroom without a window. They need to be somewhere with light. They don't actually grow well in basements, but not too sunny or you might scorch them. So if you have a south or a westward facing window, set them back a few feet from it, mist them, water them when the soil is dry, you might have to stick your finger in there, like every day to check. But water from the roots, not the crown. And also, if your fern is brown and brittle, you probably underwatered

it. And if your fern just fucking sucks and it's shedding leaves and you can't keep it alive, it might be a Boston fern, which some fern enthusiasts seem to hate because they are cheap, they are abundant, and they are an easy thing to kill. So everyone thinks all ferns are bad houseplants, but it may just be that they got a bad Boston. Also, we have an amazing domestic pathophytology episode with Tyler Thrasher about why your houseplants are dead and how to keep them alive. And I suggest you have a listen. It's great.

Tyler is very passionate about your dead houseplants and judgmental, but it's good. Okay, moving onward. This is a very, very technical scholastic question. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to answer it. Coco wants to know, I really want a fern tattoo. Does the ologist have one? it's actually not a hard question wants to know if you have a fern tattoo

I do not have a fern tattoo if you had to get a fern tattoo if they were like listen if you want to fund your lab you have to go get a fern tattoo right now or your lab is going to close down

what fern would you get a tattoo of I don't get a lady gaga furring tattoo and then maybe I will show it to lady gaga saying please fund my lab The lab. Stephanie, Fund, the lab.

Okay, so no fern tattoos. Do any of your grad students or postdocs, anyone have fern tattoos? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do? They will show off their fern tattoos. Yeah, they will lift their shirts saying, hey, see what I got. But, I mean, if you want to get a temporary one, there's a cool way to do it. How?

So earlier, I mentioned there are some friends living in the desert, right? And one adaptations they have is they produce a lot of farina. So those are little white color or yellow color powders on the leaf. So if you find a nice friend in the desert and you flip it over and you see it's bright yellow or bright white, pick it up, and then you can put on your pants, put on your shorts, and you can smash it. And then they will leave the impressions of that foreigner on your shirts or pants. And this is beautiful. It's beautiful. And it's temporary and it's free.

It's temporary. Yeah. Just don't do it in a national park. Yeah. Okay. Don't do it a national park. And maybe draw ferns. You could always draw ferns too.

You could take a sharpie and draw a fern on you. See how you like it. Yeah. What about Mads and Cass the Dog Nerd? Rowan Tree, Danny C, murder, murder, so many people. Ella Raptor, Sustainable Sirenian. I want to know if you have a favorite fern. Danny C. wants to know what's the prettiest fern, in your opinion.

I know this is really putting you on the spot because there's so many ferns that are going to be like, oh, really, interesting. But do you have a favorite fern that you just are like, close to your heart? I cannot answer that question. It's like, who's your favorite child kind of questions? No. They're all good. Okay, what about smell? Again, Adi Capello.

Matt Meznik, first-time question asker. Brenna wanted to know. Brenna said, why do ferns have that incredible fern smell? And Matt Mesnick's wife said, why do crushed up ferns smell so delicious? Okay, so the first question is that I don't know what kind of nose this person has, but I never be able to get the fern smell. I recently got a candle of an apology that has a,

label as a fern, but then I'll look at the ingredient, it has no ferning it, and doesn't smell like a fir, I don't know. But then the crushed ferns, yes, so there's a species called hay-sanded ferns. And it's famous for, you know, you hike across it and then the crushed on leaves, you have the hay-scented smell. But that's very specific for that fern species. Some ferns, they are sweet. So if you want to taste it, there's a species. It's called polypidium glycerizer, so glyceriza means sugar rhizome, and it has like licorice taste to it. In the floor of North America, if you look at the keys, how to identify the species,

there's a few notes about different species would taste different. So you have to chew the rhizomes and then remember the taste, and then that's how you identify the species. It's kind of like when geologists are out there licking rocks a little bit. You know how geologists like Blake rocks to be like, this one's salty? But definitely make sure that you know what you're munching on beforehand, right? Yeah. Definitely.

What about touch response? Jessica Dub, Manatee Lover, and Freddie and Eli want to know what makes certain ferns react so quickly. How come not all of them can? But Jessica Dubet asked, what causes some of them to close up when they're touched? Okay, so they are not ferns. They're mimosa. It's a ligum plant. So here you go. There you go. Mistaken identity. Right? Well, they do have that factory dissect the leaves. So I guess, yeah. Is that, what is the name of that leaf structure? Is it pinnate or?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Pinatifies, yes. Okay. One person wanted to know, Laurel said, how do I become ferns after I die, especially if they're surrounded by big moss and trees like if you wanted to die and then become a bunch of ferns is there a place where you should ask for your body to be deposited you do you go and go you know what i mean i will go to new zealand new zealand yeah just die in new zealand yeah okay new zealand there you go so get a passport to new zealand walk into the woods when it's your time but not before Alyssa wanted to know, because I know that your parents were, like, amazing and got you field guides.

Alyssa Diodato wants to know, if you have any favorite field guides or fern books, has anyone just, like, absolutely knocked it out of the park with a fern book? This is a trick question. I have one. Well, there you go. Like mine. Wow, that's obnoxious. That's the best. It's right here if you want to see.

Yes, dude. There you go. Get your book. The book is called ferns, lessons in survival from Earth's most adaptable plants. And it has chapters on ferns on trees, ferns as trees, desert ferns, ferns and animals, humans and ferns, the past and the future of ferns. And it is just an elegant and gorgeously illustrated book. it belongs on your coffee table or under a holiday tree we'll link it in the show notes

Top shelf for a book also But in terms of field guide There's a new one by Emily Sessa for New York Petanical Garden And that's a beautiful friend guide You should get Does Zach Gallifanakis know of your work? No

No I think someone needs to tell him I know his work I know his work He doesn't know mine You need to get him a copy of your book Yeah If he doesn't have it, I want him to sit between two copies of your Fern book.

And I interview Lady Gaga. Yes, and interview Lady Gaga. Oh, my God. You can be on set as a consultant. I mean, the federal funding is going away, and we all need money to do research. Yeah. So whatever it takes, man. Whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes. We'll send it up the chain. We're like, if anyone listening to this, no Zach Halvanakis and or Lady Gaga. Please. For research in trouble. Well, the last questions I always ask her, what is the hardest part about your job? And right now, federal funding is in the toilet, and things are in absolutely bonkers. We got climate change.

What's the hardest part about what you do, or what's gotten harder, or is there something that's just annoying? I think funding has been more and more difficult. We spend a lot of time writing proposals, and sometimes we got it's really good. feedback for NSF, USDA, DOE, those federal agencies, and they just don't have enough money to fund all the good research projects. And, you know, some firm research can really change things, right? The insect site of things I mentioned earlier, right, that has the actual practical translations into agriculture. Some people are studying symbolysis with center bacteria. If we can engineer its imbalances of

center bacteria with some corn plants maybe or rice plants, that will also change how we do our agriculture. So a lot of this have real translations to real world. And also, foreign diversity is going away because all the things you mentioned, we do really need to understand their diversity before they disappeared. And those kind of research is really, hard to get funding um so lady gaga if you're listening help us out what about the best thing what do you love like what keeps you going so i guess the discovery and also working with people

i have a really awesome lab and it's really fun talking to them i think what makes science great is the people it's great to nerd out together and i love that fern people are rowdy and stick together That's so great. And there's going to be people listening that are like, I'm a fern person, and I never knew that there were other fern people out there that I could just join up with.

Well, join American Friends Society. Oh, my God. Get your book. This is amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. This is just one of my favorites. I think your book should be a holiday gift for anyone who likes plants.

Thank you. Get the book. So ask Furntastic people, for reals, not smart questions, because they may have the same questions on their mind. And please grab a copy of Dr. Lee's book, Ferns, Lessons in Survival from Earth's Most Adaptable Plants, which we will link in the show notes for you alongside more of his research. We have a ton more links up at alleyward.com slash ologies slash terrodology. We're at Ologies on Instagram, a blue sky. I'm at Allie Ward on both. We have shorter kid-friendly episodes of Ologies called Smologies, S-M-O-M-O-M-O-S-M-M-E.

L-O-G-I-E-S available. Wherever you get podcasts, they're in their own separate feed. You can subscribe to. And Ologies merch is at Ologiesmerch.com, and you can join our Patreon for a dollar at Patreon.com. Aaron Talbert admins the Ologies Podcasts Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website, Noel Dolworth, keeps us evolving through time as

scheduling producer, managing director, Susan Hale, is the fractal path that moves us forward. Jake Chafee edits our massive genome of audio alongside lead editor and always nature adjacent Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn unfurled the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I will tell you a secret from my sometimes ashamed brain this week. It's that I was away for our ologies live show in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago. And then I went straight to Lisbon. I left the country for six days for a friend's wedding. And it was wonderful. And then I came back. It was Thanksgiving. My point is my inbox is a mess. It's so bad. It's just a tangled understory of branches and dead stuff and leaf litter and pythons and strangling vines. I have so many emails to return. It's just frightening. Honestly, Ward, you're playing with fire here. So if I owe you an email, I swear, today's the day. Also, I have never seen the fern gully, which everyone wants to know about. Everyone has questions about it's a 1992 animated classic. Your friend Wikipedia just told me that it was Robin Williams' first animated film ever. And that, quote, Williams provided 14 hours of improvised lines for the part, which had been originally conceived as an eight-minute role.

14 hours of improv. I can't even imagine the vibe in the room. 14 hours. And I can't return an email. Okay, I'm off. Bye-bye. Akaderminology. Mamiology.

Cryptozoology. Littology. Nanotechnology. Meteorology. Pectology. Nephology. Nephology. Seriology.

Cellinology. Cellinology. Who killed Fern? Who killed Fern?