Short Wave - Congrats! It's A Tomato

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

A few years ago, a team of scientists set out on a field expedition in the rugged, dry Northern Territory of Australia. There, they found a plant that was both strange and familiar hiding in plain sight. After careful research during the pandemic, the newly described tomato recently made its debut in PhytoKeys, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. Today, Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber talks to lead author Tanisha Williams about the plant's journey from the side of a trail in the Australian Outback to a greenhouse in rural Pennsylvania. Check out more of our favorite plant episodes:- When Autumn Leaves Start To Fall https://n.pr/3YuWOP6- Traditional Plant Knowledge Is Not A Quick Fix https://n.pr/3E4CUSU- New Discoveries In Underwater Plant Sex https://n.pr/3I4W9wC- Yep, We Made Up Vegetables https://n.pr/3xo6yyw- Micro Wave: Does Talking To Plants Help Them Grow?https://n.pr/40UO6v2See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Dr. Tenisha Williams has always loved plants, a love nurtured by her great-grandmother. We had these African violets all over the home, and I used to love to touch them because they have those fuzzy leaves. And she would just keep all of these plants alive. We would go to farms and, like, pick our own vegetables and foods like that. So she really instilled that really early love for plants. She was just molding me to love plants in her own way. Even so, Tenisha had no idea she might have a future in botany.

In fact, she didn't even know botany was a thing. That all changed her sophomore year of college when she took a study abroad class. And we stayed in the Amazonian rainforest and it blew my mind. I was like, oh my gosh, this is magnificent. The mahogany tree. It was fascinating. The animals, the plants there, it just really opened my mind.

And so that's when I started to think about botany and ecology in this line of work. Now, Tenisha's a plant ecologist and botanist at Bucknell University and founder of Black Botanist Week, an online campaign to promote and create a safe place for black people who love plants. For the past few years, Tunisia's been part of a research team studying a mysterious plant in the Australian Outback.

So this plant is low-growing, kind of sprawling across the ground, these nice kind of green leaves, but it has prickles all over and these really nice kind of light purple to dark purple flowers. Those prickles, Tanisha described, the ones growing all over the plant, turned out to be a key detail in figuring out just what this plant is, a never before described species of Australian bush tomato. When they're first developing, they look kind of greenish, like a green tomato. They're about the size of like a cherry tomato, so they're not like really huge.

And then they turn like this yellowish color. Have you tasted one? I have not actually tasted the species, but I hear that this one is not. It's a little bitter. It's a little sour. So it's not a species that you would want to eat. Okay. But there are plenty in salenums in the genus that are very yummy and tasty.

This particular species is called Salanum Scalarium, and Tunisia and her colleagues' research was published in December 2022 in the journal Fidoquis. Ever in your life, did you imagine you'd be part of studying and naming a plant species that's never been scientifically described before? Not at all. I had heard of folks doing this. I just never thought I would be a part of a group that would describe a new to Western science species. And I'm just blown away. It's been a fabulous collaboration between students and postdocs and professors and Australian scientists. It's been really nice to see how you could do such collaborative work. Today on the show, the journey to find and name the Salanum Scalarium, the Australian bush tomato hiding in plain sight.

I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. The journey to the Salenum Scalarium. Mariam's big published day, begins back in 2019, before Tunisia even made her way to Bucknell University. A team of scientists were on a field expedition in the northern territory of Australia. The landscape is rugged, rocky, and dry. And they were walking along this trail in the Juddboro Gregory National Park. Biologist Chris Martine looked down.

Right beside the trail, he saw a plant that kind of looked familiar. A salino or bush tomato. A genus he's been studying for over 20 years. And so he's like, oh, okay, like this is the saline? I'm like, let's just check it out. And as he was checking it out, he was like, this looks a little different. It was the stems that caught his attention. There was something unique about them, something he couldn't quite place.

So they had their collecting permits. They were with an Australian collaborator. And so they made collections, took pictures. And at that time, the plant had fruit on it. Which is lucky because the fruit contains seeds. And those seeds would allow the researchers to grow the plant back in their own greenhouses. That's how they started. It really was just looking around the landscape and kind of seeing like, what do we know and what don't we know.

So the biologist Chris Martine brought the plant specimens back to a greenhouse in rural Pennsylvania. And that's when Tenisha got involved as a postdoctoral fellow at Bucknell University. So tell me about that growing process. Tell me what that was like. Yeah, we have a really good deal here at Bucknell University. We grow a lot of salinums and a lot of rare salinums, a lot of salinums that people send us seeds and say, like, I'm not sure what this is. I know it's a salinum, but can you tell me what species this is? So I as a postdoc and Dr. Martine and our undergraduate students, we go in, we water, we measure, we check on the plants. By then the pandemic had arrived. It was early days. Many people weren't leaving their homes, but each day, Today, Tanisha would go to the greenhouse and care for the seeds that Chris carried all the way back from the Australian Outback. We use something called integrative pest management, also known as IPM. So we're putting out like good bugs to fight like aphids and white flies.

There's common things that you have. So we're in the greenhouse every single day checking in on these plants. And I love it. I love it. Something that really helped me out in the pandemic. Like I knew what day it was because I was an essential. staff because I had to keep these plants alive. Oh, I love that. Okay, so now you're growing these plants. Tell us what it takes to identify that plant as never being scientifically described before.

Like, what is the process for that? So once we take the measurements, we're going to compare those measurements. So we're counting prickles on the leaves, prickles on the stem, and we know with known species there's a range. Like Dayolcom has this many prickles on the stem, and scalarium doesn't fit within diocum and the other species. And so there's no other species that have these prickles on the male stem that's holding up the flower. And so that's how we're classifying it as something different. The next step that we took is we have collaborators throughout Australia. And we have some folks that are also describing new species.

And so we're trying to be very cognizant of what we're doing. doing here. So we haven't found any documentation of or been able to talk to any folks that we know that are within the Aboriginal community that know about this plant, but we know Aboriginal folks are in the landscape. So that's why we also give the common name to this plant is called Garananone Bush Tomato. The plant has two names. The English common name, which Tenetia just mentioned, and the scientific name, Salanum Scalarium. So we came up with the name Salanum Scalarium and giving knot to three reasons. The first reason is the male rakeas, that male stem that holds the flower, is prickled. And Scalarium actually is the Latin word for staircase. And so we're

giving a nod to that. The species was actually found near a staircase in a national part. So giving nod to where the species was found. And then lastly, we want to give a knot to having that staircase is opening up access to all people in natural spaces. So making sure that Australians feel welcome within their natural spaces, as well as folks here in the U.S. feel welcome in their natural spaces. So do you see that as an important through line in your work, that you're trying to also make what you're doing accessible to everybody? Yes, yes. That is something that I really am focusing on my work, is making sure that science is accessible and botany is accessible and accessible, meaning through Black Botanist Week,

we completely change the definition of botany and who a botanist could be, meaning that you don't need an academic degree to be at botanist. You just need a love for plants. If you love your house plants, you're a botanist, if you love to farm, porch gardens, wherever it is you love, if you love plants, you're a botanist. And these plants that you're studying, the plants that you see, every day in your home, you are the expert on those plants. Like you're looking at them day in and day out. And that's the same thing I do when I'm going to the greenhouse. I'm looking at these plants day in and day out and having them really kind of show me or tell me what is going on with them.

So you are an expert. Botanist and plant ecologist Tanisha Williams. If you, like Tanisha, are plant obsessed, check today's episode notes for a list of some of our favorite plant focused episodes. This episode was produced by Britt Hansen and edited by supervising producer Rebecca Ramirez. The facts were checked by Annel Oza. Carly Strange was the audio engineer.

Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Our senior director of programming is Beth Donovan. And the senior vice president of programming is Anya Grinman. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.