Unexplainable - Plants with eyes?

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

In the temperate rainforests of Chile, there is a vine that can shapeshift to copy the look of other plants. But how? Can it... see them? Or is something weirder happening? For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. It's unexplainable. I'm producer Manning Want, and I'm here with Vox Science reporter Benji Jones, who's been looking into a particularly strange plant. So I have been talking with a scientist in Chile named Ernesto Giannoli, and he told me about a very mysterious plant, Bochila trifoliolata. Oh my gosh. What a name. Bochila trifoliolata. Yeah, nailed it. And he told me about a pretty remarkable discovery. that he made over a decade ago.

It was during field work that he was doing with some postdocs and grad students in a forest in southern Chile. And I was alone in the forest, which is an experience that is special. And I went walking in this very dark part of the forest. And every now and then I stopped, look around, looking close to the leaves, and then continue.

And then he comes across, a plant that he knows quite well called Arayan. I like the green of aryan leaves. I like the spiny tips of Arrayan. And when he went closer to it, he realized that these Arrayan leaves were actually part of a different plant. I realized that some of the leaves

were coming from a much thinner stem. And when he traced it down to the stem, he realized that that plant was another species entirely called Bochila trifoliolata. Literally, as this vine is creeping up trees and other plants around it, it's growing leaves that seem to copy the shape of those plant's leaves. The word mimicking started to appear in my head. This is mimicking? No, it can't be. What he was observing in that moment was Bochila, mimicking.

the leaves of Arrayan, including this little spiky tip. Then I started to run. No, not walk. I started to run to other trees, different trees, and looking for bocilla. Oh my God, again. Oh, my God, again. And then it was like, at one point I said, is this true? I mean, I am dreaming because I was, as I said, I was alone in the forest.

And he ran back to the other researchers to tell them, and they were like, you must be high. Ernesto, stop using drugs. It's not a good idea to be high when you are sampling plants in the forest. So this plan is shape-shifting? So Bochila can shape-shift as it grows, mimicking the plants around it, not just in kind of a rough shape of the leaf, but it can also mimic the color of leaves. It can mimic their text.

to an extent. It can mimic their size, in some cases, getting 10 times larger than it would be normally. So this isn't just some, like, rinky dink mimicry. It seems really advanced. And right now, Ernesto thinks that Bokila can mimic as many as 20 different plant species. Okay. And what's especially cool is that a single individual of Bokila, so, like one of these vines, can actually mimic two different plants with different leaves at the same time. Oh, wow. So it's just pretty remarkable. And as far as scientists know, there's no other plant out there in the world that can do this kind of mimicry.

So how is it doing it? We don't know. That question that from that day until now is haunted me. How? For more than a decade, scientists have been trying to figure out the answer to that question. And it turns out that it's a really difficult question to answer. There's no explanation for Bokila's abilities that won't sound crazy. There's no way. There's no way to avoid that.

But what's really cool is that if any of these ideas proved to be true, it could really expand our understanding of what plants are capable of. Okay, Benji, so how do scientists think that this Bokie? plant is mimicking all these other plants around it. So one answer comes from a sort of fringe group of researchers known as plant neurobiologists. Neurobiology is a study of nervous systems, so it's strange to include this with plants because they don't have nervous systems. But that term for this field of research is fitting because this group of scientists think

that plant cells are actually pretty similar to neurons, and they also think these bigger ideas like that plants might possess consciousness, a form of sentience, maybe they even feel pleasure and pain, and they perhaps have a brain-like structure similar to animals, and even perhaps a form of vision. Like seeing with eyes of some sort or? Sort of. So even mainstream researchers have known for a while that plants have lens like cells in epidermis, which is like the skin of plants. But what these plant neurobiologists are saying is that

plants might be able to use those lens-like cells to actually process images of what's happening around them and then copy it in the structure of leaves. So basically we are talking about plants possessing vision and actually having like an ability to use vision to make decisions and to shape shift. And according to these folks, that could be what's happening here. The bochila plant could, in a sense, be using a form of vision to, quote, see plants around them and then copy it. Oh, wow. One of the first studies I came across did this experiment where they had four bochila plants, four of these mimic plants,

and they put them next to a fake plant, a plastic plant. And their thinking was that if they try to get Boquila to copy a plastic plant, and it does, it would indicate that vision could be what's at play because the plastic plant isn't telling Bochila anything because it's plastic. There's no other form of communication happening, so it would have to have some form of vision if it was able to copy these plastic plants. And sure enough, according to this paper, The bochila plant was actually able to copy these plastic plants.

So I was like, oh my God, that's amazing. Like, there has to be some vision-based explanation for how a plant could be mimicking other plants as it's growing, which, again, is nuts because you don't think of a plant as being a creature that possesses vision like an animal or humans. So you're saying that it's copying this plastic plant, which isn't alive. You know, it's just an object. So does that mean it can see the plastic plant? Yes. No.

Okay. So I would like to think of myself as a good journalist. So I reached out to a bunch of other plant scientists, and it was a big, like, want-w-wat. Oh. There are a lot of scientists who just don't agree with it, and they really don't buy the conclusions of this paper. Basically, there were problems with the study, with the design of the study, and with the theory of plant vision. And so it kind of deflated my excitement around this plastic plant vision hypothesis. What was wrong with the study?

So one of the main problems that scientists pointed out to me is that the authors didn't control all the potential variables that can influence leaf shape. So, for example, younger leaves and older leaves on the same plant will look pretty different. So you have to make sure that what you're studying is the same age across all the plants. So it might not necessarily be mimicry. The leaves could be different for different reasons. Yeah. So the bokela might have just been growing and coincidentally looked like the plastic plant. Yeah.

They could naturally be looking more like the plastic plant for other reasons that they didn't rule out. So then, bochila probably can't see? As far as mainstream scientists know, that's probably not what's happening here. But I don't want to shut down, like, these scientists, these plant neurobiologists are not unlike philosophers. Like, they're thinking about what it means to be sentient and what it means to have consciousness. And I think those are really interesting conversations. I think it is a good question to ask whether plants are conscious. But I think there's a line where, like, you just have to back up those, you have to test those questions.

Like, that's where the line is. You need to actually support your thinking with studies and what research tells us. I mean, it's that whole idea that big ideas require big evidence. Yes. Yeah. No, I mean, that's a great way of putting it. It also kind of sounds like the idea of vision is kind of like thinking about plants like us, you know, plants having sensory systems and eyes like we do.

I mean, do you think that thinking about plants this way is a problem? I mean, sometimes they are similar to humans. Like, there are ways that plants are similar to humans and animals. They communicate with each other, which is really incredible. Like when a caterpillar starts, like, munching on the leaves of a plant, it will send out these like airborne compounds, like a spray of perfume, whatever, that tells plants around it to mount a defense. So there's like communication that's happening. Some of them can move very quickly in like a timescale that humans understand like a Venus fly trap, which you can see closed. There's also this awesome plant called the telegraph plant that swivels its leaves in like real time to catch like rays of light. Like super cool. So plants are reactive. to their environment. Scientists even talk about plant behavior. That's a term that you can use validly. It's plant behavior. But there are problems using a human-centric lens to think about

plants. I think part of it, it can be limiting. It can limit your understanding of how plants are doing things. So like if you're starting from a human lens, then yes, it makes sense to be like, okay, plants probably have eyes, but like that might not be the right hypothesis. You have to think bigger than that, which means like getting to the level of a plant and how it interacts with the world. So if the bocila plant isn't seeing, how should we understand it then? Yeah. So if we're not looking at plants like they might have eyes and vision, like humans do, what's the alternative way this could be happening? How would a plant actually do this? And there is another idea that I'm very excited to. tell you about because I think it's even cooler than plants with eyes.

It has to do with an invisible world all around us. And I will tell you after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less.

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whether this bochila plant mimics other plants by seeing, which might be because we're thinking about it like us, like something that has senses. But if we try to be less anthropocentric, what does that look like? What's weirder than plant seeing? So it's all about microbes. These tiny pieces of life that are bacteria, fungus, viruses, invisible forms of life. And a normal plant has tons of these all around it all the time. You can think of plants as these tiny ecosystems colonized by these little microbes that do all kinds of things, kind of like a big tree in the forest that has monkeys on it and chameleons and whatever, all supported within this one tree.

And we actually know this from previous research, that microbes like bacteria can affect plants in a lot of different ways. So they help plants battle disease, they help plants find nutrients and so forth. But Ernesto's theory is that those microbes that live around plants on plants these like microbe clouds might be able to influence the shape of leaves. It's almost like these microbes have instruction manuals for how to build a leaf. What does this have to do with mimicry? So according to Ernesto's theory, normally microbes around these plants only influence the plants that they're a part of. So these are these little contained ecosystems. Bochila, this mimic plant, however, might actually be able to communicate in some way or be influenced by the most.

microbes of the plants around it. Wow. Just for the sake of explanation, just imagine that you and I, you Mandy, me Benji, were sitting next to each other on a couch, watching White Lotus. Okay. And the microbes on my body, my gut bugs, my gut microbiome occupants somehow started talking to you or colonizing your body. I have great gut bugs, just so you know, okay?

I don't appreciate your tone. I don't want the gut bugs. And then within some period of time, by the end of the episode, you actually look like me. I mean, like, that is kind of what we're talking about here, which is so wild. Is there any evidence that microbes or what we're call in bug sort of things are behind the mimic plant changing its shape? Yeah, so there's not a ton, but Ernesto did the study. last year that basically found that there are similarities between communities of bacteria living inside the one plant that Bochila is mimicking and Bochila itself.

Oh, wow. Bochila and Arayon, for example, would have very similar communities of bacteria living inside them versus a plant that Bochila was not mimicking. So it seems like microbes have something to do with it. But like how are these microbes influencing the leaf shape of this plant? So that's still a big question mark, but there are a couple ideas. So one way this might work is that the microbes that are on the bokela plant that came from one of the plants around it affect the way that the genome, the DNA of the bochila plant, is expressed.

So imagine we're in a rainforest in Chile, and there is a bochila plant wrapping around this Arayan plant, the plant that Ernesto found the mimicry behavior next to. Okay. So the microbes of Arrayan could then be colonizing Bochila, and those microbes from the Arayan plant might actually influence which genes are turned off and on in the Bochila. plant, and those genes might affect themselves the shape of leaves and the size of leaves and so forth. And so scientists call this epigenetic. So it's not actually altering the genetic code of the bochila plant, but affecting how that code results in physical traits in the plant. And there are previous studies that show microbes can control which genes in a plant's DNA are turned off and on. So the microbes of one plant are making the genes in the other.

plant turn on and off, which makes the other plant look like it? Yes. Okay. The other idea is even more bizarre, and it could involve something called horizontal gene transfer or HGT. It's possible that the microbes that are coming from Aaryan to Bokhila, the mimic plant, are somehow taking genetic material from Aaryon and putting it into Bokila so that Bokila can make the same kinds of leaves. So I'm literally talking here about like taking the genes from

one plant and putting them in another through microbes, which is totally wild. That's so, how is that possible? I looked into this because I didn't know that this was a thing that can happen. And there's actually like a fair amount of research showing this process in other organisms, not with bochila specifically, but we do know that there are examples of bacteria basically injecting some of their genes into a plant to make the plant do something for it. So like HGT is is super strange and amazing, but it's real. And so it could be at play here. So stepping back for a second, we have this vision explanation that seems pretty intuitive because it's thinking about plants like us or like animals. But the evidence doesn't seem to

back it up yet. Yeah. And then we have this other idea about microbes, which are turning genes on and off, or bringing genetic material from one plant to another. And this has better evidence, but it's just kind of hard to wrap your head around. And what's cool is that if this microbe idea turns out to be true, it means that plants might look like they do because of the bugs on them. So this little tiny vine, this mimicry plant, might actually reveal a lot about kind of just like what's happening under the hood

in the world of plants, but I don't know. It's too early to tell. I mean, microbes can influence genes. They can even carry DNA between different organisms and perhaps even help a plant shape shift. I mean, this is seriously cool stuff. I also find, like, the microbe idea,

like, also a little bit more freaky. Right. You know, like if I heard of a plant that could mimic other plants, my first thought would not be, oh, that's probably because of the invisible microbe clouds that are tinkering with the plant's genetic code. I mean, do you think it might be more accurate to say that plants might be a little bit more like aliens than like us?

Like, I wonder if that's a helpful comparison here. I only do because I think that if you start with the thinking that they're aliens allows you to think about plants as being very different from us and kind of start with a blank slate being like, all right, how would this mechanism happen? How would it actually mimic something else based on the morphology of this structure of this plant versus being like, how would we do it?

How would an animal do it? So then how should the plant do it? So I think just like, I like the idea of thinking about plants as aliens because you can think very open-mindedly. We have this tendency of thinking of evolution as linear where you have like humans at the top, plants at the bottom, like sea sponges close to the bottom, whatever, and like you're evolving upwards

to being like a higher order organism that's like somehow more valuable. People typically think of plants as unsophisticated and less evolved. And those graphics that show apes evolving into humans are like super misleading because it looks, again, linear. But in reality, plants have been around for like 500 million years. We've been around for just a fraction of that.

Plants are extremely evolved. They're just evolved to do different things. They're evolved to fulfill different needs. They are really good at finding sun. Like, they do that well. They're just growing and being beautiful and doing their thing, just as evolved as we are. Exactly.

This episode was reported by Benji Jones and produced by me, Manning Wint. There was editing from Brian Resnick, Catherine Wells, Meredith Hodnott, and Noam Hassanfeld. mixing in sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam, and fact-checking from Zoe Mullick. Neil Donatia is getting ready for some South Indian filter coffee, and Bird Pinkerton reached down to pick up the loud spinning penny, but it wouldn't budge. Then, when she started pulling harder, the penny started spinning her. Special thanks to Lincoln Taze, Liz Haswell, Simon Gilroy, Franchard Shek Belushka,

Felipe Amashita, and to all the plant biologists for thinking big with us. And if you have any thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're at Unexplanable at Vox.com. And we'd also love it if you left us a review or a rating. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week. I personally also am trying to run an experiment because I bought the plant. No, you didn't. Yes.

No, you didn't. I was delighted to discover that there is a nursery out west that sells bokela trifoliolata plants. They come from clippings. They've had them for a while. And they shipped one to me. And the whole thing was like $17. Wait. Is it literally in your house?

It is literally in my house. Can you show me? Yeah. Give me a second. Okay. Hold on. Oh, it's so. So small.

Ugly ass plant. No. Speaking of respecting plants. What'd you say? Nothing. I'm being really mean to plants. Is that you said? No.

Okay. This is my bokela plant, my mimic plant. Wow. It's super tiny. I know. I was really, when I opened the package, I was expecting to see, like, I don't know, a normal size plant. This is, like, this is, like, the least. Leaves are literally fingernail-sized, and it's only about eight inches tall, and is not in the best shape, but that's probably because of the journey that it went on.

But I'm going to be putting this next to one of my other plants. I don't even know the name of it. Yeah. I'm very excited to grow this plant and see what happens. Wow. You better keep it alive. I will keep you updated.