Cyathea rojasiana tree ferns seem to thrive in Panama’s Quebrada Chorro forest by turning dead leaves into roots that seek out nutrient-rich soil.
To get by in the waterlogged, low-nutrient soil of the Quebrada Chorro forest in western Panama, a species of tree fern repurposes its dead fronds, turning them into roots.
The discovery “was completely serendipitous,” says James Dalling, a tropical forest ecologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, Dalling and colleagues were on an expedition to study how the roots of the tropical conifertree ferns. The researchers tried to move dead fern fronds out of the way and found that the leaves were rooted in the ground. “We would have missed it if we hadn’t actually been digging around in the soil,” Dalling says.
Dalling’s team dug up some of the leafy roots and, back in the lab, planted them in pots with a stable form of nitrogen called nitrogen-15. Later dissections of the rootlets showed that they pulled the nutrient up into the plants, indicating that the structures function as roots, the researchers report. ) of the eastern United States, for instance, can reproduce by sprouting new plants from the tips of its leaves.
Neotropical fern expert Robbin Moran is similarly stunned. “I have not previously heard of this in ferns or other plants,” says Moran, now retired from New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. “It’s weird.” Dalling plans to team up with a plant anatomist to better understand the structure of the rootlets and wants to probe them for mycorrhizal fungi, which play a role in how the roots of some plants absorb nutrients. “I’m really curious now,” he says. “Are there fungi in these rootlets?”
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