Vision without eyes? Intelligence without a brain? Are plants more akin to us than we have been prepared to acknowledge? Or are they different in ways we will forever strain to imagine? One way or another, a vine with some unusual abilities is shaking the field of botany to its foundations.

On this episode: Zoë Schlanger (author of the newly-released, New York Times bestselling book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth) takes us to the misty rainforests of Chile and back to report on what might just be the world’s most extraordinary plant — hidden in plain sight.

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With music by Modern Biology, Mort Garson, Hotspring, Thumbug, and Sunfish Moon Light.

For credits, citations, transcript, and more, visit futureecologies.net/listen/fe-5-10-everything-will-be-vine

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You are listening to Season Five of

Future Ecologies

Okay, here we go.

You know the drill.

Mendel,

Adam,

Future Ecologies.

and this is the last episode of our fifth

season.

Thanks for coming with us!

And don't worry, we will be back soon. In the

meantime, we're going to be keeping the podcast feed warm

and cozy over the summer with a few extra treats for your ears.

Today, we've got something really special. Because it's a

story about plants.

It's more of a mystery about plants. Because

despite our budding interest, our story today reveals that

many leaves remain unturned.

The story comes to us from journalist and friend of

the show, Zoe Schlanger, the author of the newly released,

New York Times best-selling book, The Light Eaters — How the

Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New

Understanding of Life on Earth.

Zoë took one of our recorders to the jungles of

Chile and back to report on what might just be the world's most

ordinary, extraordinary plant. We'll let her take it from here.

So, without further ado, this is Everything Will Be Vine.

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

Zoë Schlanger: Journalists in my line of work tend to be focused

on death. Or the harbingers of it — disease, disaster, decline.

That is how climate journalists mark time as the earth passes

benchmark after grim benchmark on its way into the foreseen

crisis. There’s only so much of this that one person can take.

Or perhaps my tolerance was thin and easily worn out after years

of focus on droughts and floods. In recent years I’d begun to

feel numb and empty. I needed some of the opposite.

What, I wondered, is the opposite of death? Creation,

perhaps. A sense of becomings instead of endings. Plants are

that, given as they are to continuous growth. They’d

soothed me all my life, long before studies came out

confirming what we already knew — that time spent among plants

can ease the mind better than a long sleep. Living in a dense

city, I’d walked in the park under a canopy of yews and elms

when I needed to clear my head; I’d spent long minutes gazing at

the new leaves forming on my potted philodendrons when my

nerves were fried. Plants are the very definition of creative

becoming — they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion,

probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a livable

future.

A life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot

comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants

have come up with some of the most creative methods for

survival of any living thing, us included. Many are so ingenious

that they seem nearly impossible for an order of life we’ve

mostly relegated to the margins of our own lives, the decoration

that frames the theatrics of being an animal. Yet there they

are all the same, these unbelievable abilities of

plants, defying our anaemic expectations. Through

conversations with scientists around the world I would learn

that their way of life is so astonishing, that no one really

knows the limits of what a plant can do. In fact, it seemed that

no one quite knows what a plant really is.

This is, of course, a problem for the scientific field of

botany. Or it’s the most exciting thing to happen to it

in a generation, depending on how comfortable you feel with

seismic shifts in what you once thought to be true. As I looked

deeper, I would find a scientific field eating itself

alive with contradictions — points of contention multiplying

as fast as the mysteries. But something in me was attracted to

this lack of neat answers. Who doesn’t feel both drawn to and

repulsed by the unknown?

In the 19th century, naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt wondered

aloud why being outdoors evoked something existential and true.

“Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to

his soul,” he wrote; “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,”

and therefore nature “gives the impression of the whole.”

Humboldt went on to introduce the European intellectual world

to the concept of the planet as a living whole, with climatic

systems and interlocking biological and geological

patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.”

This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological

thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic

communities, each acting upon the others.

The question that I found mired in controversy was whether

plants could be considered intelligent — and, for an even

bolder minority, whether they could be considered conscious

and communicative. For all of their amazing, adaptive

behaviour, were they sensate agents? Or, were they each

simply acting out a predetermined genetic script?

Although I had come to this corner of the scientific world

at an exciting time, these questions were anything but new.

At the turn of the 20th Century, Jagadish Chandra Bose, a

physicist-turned-biologist in Kolkata, India, had begun to

experiment and measure the electrical responses of plants,

and became convinced that they shared a functional similarity

to those in animal tissues.

JC Bose biopic: 1901, the Royal Institution, London. He gave a

lecture demonstration of his latest experiment.

The Secret Life of Plants: Touching the leaves of Mimosa pudica with

a cotton soaked in ether, Bose demonstrates the fainting

response in a plant.

The Bose experiments were denied publication by the Royal

Society. By daring to suggest that electrical responses are

present in plants, he had offended the learned members.

Zoë Schlanger: Despite inventing instruments of unprecedented

precision across several disciplines, Bose would be

expunged from the scientific canon for his fringe beliefs — a

fate not shared by Alexander Graham Bell, who was driven to

invent the telephone in hopes of communicating with the dead; or

Thomas Edison, whose experiments ranged into telekinesis and

telepathy. Dark-skinned and Indian, however, Bose and his

ideas were denied a place in Western textbooks for nearly a

century.

Popular books were a different story. In 1973, the publication

of The Secret Life of Plants took the world by storm. 5 years

later, a film by the same name, with a soundtrack by Stevie

Wonder.

Plants have been wired into a complex computer. The

change of mood as they react to the crowds of visitors will be

converted into musical expression. As the people move

among the plants, the sounds they hear are the plants

reacting to their presence. An ephemeral exchange of energy

linking to diverse life forms, becomes a symphony of emotions.

Zoë Schlanger: At the dawn of New Age culture, the world was

ready to inhale ideas about how plants were just as alive as we

are. It was an immediate and meteoric success, offering an

elysian new way to attend to the living earth.

In some mysterious way, the plant which is attached to

the instrument is able to feel the mutilation of its comrade.

Zoë Schlanger: The Secret Life of Plants was a glimpse at a

society on the verge of direct communication with its leafy

brethren. It would inspire thousands of hours of one-sided

conversations, and some very worn-out cassettes of Wolfgang

Amadeus Motzart.

And it would turn out to be a beautiful collection of myths.

The Kirlian Witness: During intensive periods of meditation

with plants, I learned to channel my energies and enter

new states of being. After spending many hours in deep

concentration, I am able to transcend my physical boundaries

and allow my own spirit to commune with the spirit of my

plant.

Zoë Schlanger: Many scientists would try and fail to reproduce

the tantalising “research” the book presented, eventually

deemed “fallacious and unprovable”. According to

botanists working at the time, the damage that Secret Life

caused to the field cannot be overstated. The twin gatekeepers

of science — funding boards and peer review boards — closed the

doors to any proposals with a whiff of plant “behaviour”.

Over the last 15 years, that tide has finally begun to turn,

with a gentle swell in both research funding and academic

publications. The march of technology, genetic sequencing

and advanced microscopes, has made it possible to come to

previously outlandish conclusions with real rigour.

But, still sensitive to the fallout from the Secret Life,

and due to the squishy, nebulous implications of the word, most

scientific authors don’t use terms like “intelligence” to

describe what they find. Nonetheless, their results

suggested that plants were much more sophisticated than anyone

had dared think.

From the nerve-like action potentials first observed by

Bose, to capabilities of memory, hearing, recognition of kin, and

incredible interactions with insects, the papers probing

remarkable plant behaviours are growing from a trickle to a

fairly robust stream.

One such paper caught my attention. It documented a vine

doing something that should have been impossible — a magic trick

that few animals have mastered, and that no accepted plant

mechanism could explain.

So, in April 2022, I flew due south for 13 hours — first from

New York City to Santiago, and from there to Puerto Montt.

Then, after driving for another 2 hours, past seemingly endless

fields of potatoes bordered by rivers and lakes, I arrived into

the Valdivian temperate rainforests of southern Chile.

Not unlike parts of the Pacific Northwest, the climate was cool

and misty, and every available space was absolutely brimming

with plant life. The constant sights of green and sounds of

rain blanketed my senses in a vibrant static hum. In 2014, a

Peruvian ecologist named Ernesto Gianoli had discovered that a

vine, common to these rainforests, was able to mimic

the shape of almost any plant it grew beside... a botanical

chameleon.

[Spanish]

Zoë Schlanger: I'm not finding what I'm looking for. It seems

like they may have cut them.

[Spanish]

Zoë Schlanger: I thought they were right here.

Unfortunately, the sudden notoriety had made this little

vine a target for poachers. It's appropriate then that it has a

particular talent for camouflage.

But here I found...

Zoë Schlanger: Oh, wow it's so tiny.

This is Boquila, yeah it’s so tiny, This

is Boquila and this is Rhaphithamnus. At first glance

you’d say it’s the same. Quite difficult to tell who's who.

Zoë Schlanger: This is Ernesto Gianoli himself. And in his

hands, Boquila trifoliolata — a slender, climbing vine, with

leaves in clusters of three. Here, one strand of Boquila was

winding its way up a tree, Rhaphithamnus spinosus. On the

part of the vine climbing the tree, its leaves had

now a dark glossy green, shrunk to a fraction of

their original size, and tapered to a point. And this was just

one example of Boquila’s mimicry. Ernesto and his

colleagues have found Boquila modelling itself on more than 20

species, and counting!

So far, what we knew about mimicry was a one to

one relationship. This species A mimics this species B. But then,

comes along Boquila and says no, I can mimic very different

species.

Zoë Schlanger: In the world of plants, mimicry is otherwise

quite limited — shaped by special circumstances of

coevolution. Like in the case of rye, once culled as an unwanted

weed by early farmers. It was effectively selected to blend in

so well with the fields of wheat that it became a cereal in its

own right. Or certain types of mistletoe, which are each

obliged to parasitize a particular host plant, tapping

directly into its vascular system. The leaves of Australian

she-oak mistletoe are strikingly similar to Australian she-oak,

likewise the leaves of eucalyptus mistletoe resemble

those of eucalyptus. Evolution has sculpted these plants to

blend in with their specific surroundings, but on an animal

timescale their appearance is fixed. Not so, with Boquila.

The same individual can mimic two

different species.

Zoë Schlanger: Boquila’s mimicry is spontaneous and flexible. A

single vine may climb across several different plants and

change its leaves accordingly.

I mean, in terms of size, one to ten ratio.

And in terms of shape, and color, vein patterns — a broad

array of traits. What is mimicry? Similar colours, maybe

similar shapes. But this goes beyond that.

Zoë Schlanger: What’s more, direct contact is unnecessary

for Boquila to model itself after another plant. It may

simply be growing nearby.

Whoa. That's huge.

Yeah it's huge. And also this, as I told, this

wavy...

Zoë Schlanger: Uh huh. The wavy edge.

Yeah wavy edge.

Zoë Schlanger: Wow. That's unbelievable. I mean, that's

like, what 15, 16 times the size over there?

Yes, exactly. Here, small Boquilas. But starts

growing larger and larger. Not all the plants, of course — not

all the leaves, of course.

Zoë Schlanger: So if you were an herbivore, your first impression

would be...?

That it's another species.

Zoë Schlanger: Yeah. Wait, is this Boquila?

Yes.

Zoë Schlanger: It's even got the yellowing.

And if we look carefully around there are five

more.

Zoë Schlanger: We are in a spot totally surrounded by Boquila on

all sides. It's sort of a glen of Boquila. There's maybe 10 or

15 other species of plants, all growing up as thick bushes, and

the Boquila is twining around all of them. And on almost every

single one I'm walking by, you have to look very closely. But

the Boquila has shifted its shape. In some areas of its

vines to match. Most of these species, in some places, the

leaf is almost the size of my hand to match long, large leaves

of one species and 10 meters away, it's smaller than my pinky

nail to match a species with very small, dark, glossy leaves

that have a strong vein down the middle and the Boquila matches

that vein and that gloss perfectly too. It's just

astounding. And the longer I spend staring at an area the

more Boquila appear, but it takes a while so if I was an

herbivore, I for sure would be tricked. If I was a deer walking

through here, I just can't imagine if they're visually

guided how they’d distinguish between these plants.

And not all of these model plants are endemic to this

rainforest. Ernesto showed me it next to a plant, creeping

buttercup, that had only recently been introduced,

sometime in the last 20 years. Here, Boquila’s duplication was

strikingly partial and imperfect. It almost felt like

witnessing a young artist practising their still-life

sketches — actively refining their skill in rendering the

world.

Every time Ernesto goes out into the field to study Boquila, he

and his colleagues discover it modelling itself on yet another

species. I was present for the addition of two plants to this

ever-growing list. First, a species of maidenhair fern, so

far the only documented instance of Boquila mimicking a fern,

which I found myself. And second, an overstory tree known

as Notro.

This is the first record of Boquila doing

something with Notro. This shape of elongated leaves is quite

rare to observe in Boquila.

Zoë Schlanger: Still riding high off of my own small

contribution, I asked Ernesto what it felt like to be the

first one to notice Boquila’s magic trick.

What is the dream of a kid who likes

science? To make a discovery, right? A dinosaur bone or

whatever. It was close to that... Close to that dream of

the kid. But still, for it to be really fulfilled, I need to see

the mechanism elucidated.

Zoë Schlanger: And in the hopes of elucidating the mysterious

mechanism of Boquila, two competing hypotheses have been

proposed — both of them revolutionary to plant science.

To crack the code of Boquila immediately will

lead us to crack a general code of plants. They go hand by hand,

I mean. Understanding Boquila will imply understanding plants.

That’s my feeling.

Zoë Schlanger: The first proposal comes from František

Baluška, founding member of the Society for Plant Neurobiology,

later conservatively renamed the Society for Plant Signalling and

Behavior. František is a controversial figure. Unlike

most of his peers, he is a loud and proud champion of plant

intelligence — in fact, he evangalizes the subjective

consciousness of all cellular life.

His hypothesis is as surprising as it is concise. He believes

that plants can see.

František Baluška: Vision in plants is controversial, but it

is strange that it is. Because plants evolved from algae and

algae have vision. So, if algae have vision, why should plants

lose this very useful ability? So, I am surprised that people

are surprised that the plant should see, because if the algae

see why not plants?

Zoë Schlanger: The suggestion that plants have a sense of

sight goes back to 1905, when the German scientist Gottlieb

Haberlandt described how structures on the surface of

leaves could function as simple optics, affording plants

thousands or even millions of tiny eyes.

František Baluška: Of course, vision in plants is not like our

humans vision. You know, they don't have an eye like we. They

have cells on the epidermis, these cells will act as a lens

and will transmit any object you will expose to these cells on

the other side. This was experimentally shown but

ignored.

Zoë Schlanger: Haberlandt’s theory would go on to fascinate

Charles Darwin’s son, Francis, but ultimately it was forgotten.

How could a plant, apparently without a nervous system or

anything we recognize as a brain, resolve an image?

František Baluška: Everything is projected on the next layer. And

how the cells in the next layer are processing the images and

sending messages further in the plant, no one knows.

Zoë Schlanger: Since Haberlandt, plants have been revealed to

have more kinds of photoreceptors on their surface

than are found in the human eye. There should be no surprise that

light matters to plants. Light is literally matter, to plants.

As any sighted person knows, the qualities of light convey a

wealth of useful information. Still, it’s a big claim to say

that plants are not just weather stations, but telescopes.

Of course, this could be studied, but first, the

science must acknowledge this ability and then the agencies

which give money for research should be willing to give money

for future research, but up until now, nothing happens, you

know, all what is done now is just our hobby.

Zoë Schlanger: František points to new research on several close

evolutionary cousins of plants. A model cyanobacteria with an

eyespot that can sense a light’s direction and move towards it.

Next, a dinoflagellate that builds a structure that

stunningly resembles a lens and retina — a chimeric assemblage

of plastids and mitochondria, no less. And, of course, he points

to Boquila.

There is no way how we would explain this without some

kind of vision.

Zoë Schlanger: So, as outlandish as it may sound at first, a kind

of plant “vision” is not entirely out of the question,

and is one of the few explanations that has been

offered to make sense of Boquila. But Ernesto is not

convinced that vision is the mechanism behind this unassuming

vine’s abilities.

Plants don't need to see in order to do great

things. How can texture, how can thickness be told from an image?

And don't forget that there are some features that are hidden.

Zoë Schlanger: Case in point, the very first plant I saw

Boquila copy with my own eyes — Rhaphithamnus spinosus. This

tree’s leaves curl over at the end, creating a spiny tip or

spike. Likewise, in its mimicry, so does Boquila. But looking

down from above, this distinguishing feature of

Raphitamnus is simply not visible.

You have to feel! You have to put your

finger on the underside of the leaf. How this is able to see

the underside of a leaf when they are placed in a particular

direction that cannot make this possible?

Zoë Schlanger: Could it be that Boquila was truly covered in

eyelike organs, and was somehow able to integrate this

information across different parts of its body — carefully

observing the Rhaphithamnus from all angles? Or was it a hole in

the plant-vision theory?

I think this is too much of an anthropocentric

view of the phenomenon.

Zoë Schlanger: As we strain to understand how Boquila can

accomplish the seemingly impossible, itself just one

example from a wave of newly-discovered plant

capabilities, the charge of “anthropomorphism” looms heavy

in the minds of many scientists. The risk of discussing plant

sensation, perception, or cognition is that such language

is inescapably tied to our sensation, perception, and

cognition; that habituation with our animal faculties biases us

to interpret plants on familiar, human terms, rather than on

their own.

František Baluška: Most people are not very happy with these

words like "pain", "cognition", and "intelligence", and

"vision", and "hearing". So they think this is forbidden for

plants, somehow. When you do a science, you should start with a

simple system and then to go to the more complex. And we would

not have this problem with anthropomorphism if we would

start our sciences with bacteria, then algae, protozoa,

protists, and then some plants — lower plants, higher plants —

animals, and then humans at the end. You all the time are blamed

by some kind of anthropomorphism, if you find

something similar to humans, you know. Of course, we are in

evolution connected. And now everything — every this term —

is loaded with human activities. So if you say sleep, pain,

cognition, anything, they say you try to humanize plants. We

try to convince them that we say "plant cognition". It is not a

human cognition. It is a plant-specific cognition.

Zoë Schlanger: Intelligence is a loaded word, perhaps overly

connected to our ideas of academic achievement. It’s been

weaponized against fellow humans for millennia, used to divide

people into hierarchies of worth and power. Yet it is, by its

very definition, still a word that contains the germ of what

we mean by alert, awake to the world, spontaneous, responsive,

decision-making. From the Latin interlegere — to discern, to

choose between.

So do plants see? Or does an assumed primacy of vision render

plants as lesser animals — diminishing these green bodies,

and leaving no room for the recognition that they may deploy

means that far exceed the human.

It's very human in nature, to try to put plants

within the frameworks that we are comfortable to deal with.

But sorry, plans are different. So, prepare. Prepare to be

challenged. Prepare to be proven wrong.

When we come back, Ernesto has his own theory

to explain this remarkable plant plasticity.

Plastic plants?!

Those too... after the break.

Zoë Schlanger: For all the times he has seen Boquila

trifoliolata, Ernesto had noticed something. Its mimicry

is rarely total. Instead, it’s patchy. Some Boquila just look

like… Boquila, even on a vine climbing a tree. This patchiness

reminded him of the stochastic look of leaf spots and wilts and

mottling. That is, it reminded him of the infection patterns of

bacteria and viruses.

Over the past few decades, another biological revolution

has been unfolding. A new appreciation for the so-called

“microbiome” — the communities of single-celled organisms

living in and on everything else. Famously, in any given

person, there are about as many non-human cells than there are

human cells. No longer are microbes considered to be

exclusively vectors of disease and decay, but are now also

recognized as essential collaborators in digestion,

mood, and ultimately health. And humanity is not unique in this

regard. Effectively all animals, like termites, fundamentally

rely on their microbiome.

To most people, the essence of a termite is its ability to digest

wood. Research has shown that this ability is conferred not by

the genes of the termite, but by bacteria living within them.

Correspondingly, those bacteria rely on other, smaller bacteria

living within them. This is the dizzyingly nested perspective

that pioneering evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis first

popularized as the “holobiont”. She defined the holobiont as a

composite organism made of many organisms working in concert. It

includes the microbiome, but also the macrobiome — the larger

beings in which and upon which the microbiomes live.

Margulis proposed that complex multicellular life first came

into being when microbes of different abilities teamed up,

eventually fusing into one entity, most notably

incorporating mitochondria and chloroplasts. She believed that

these sorts of intercellular symbioses may have been more

important to our evolutionary history than the slow, random

mutation science believed to be the source of all evolutionary

change.

Don't forget that once the mitochondria was a

bacteria. It was kind of a parasite that was welcomed by

the cell, saying "Okay, you will make energy and I will give you

a home." And that work very well so far.

Zoë Schlanger: Although initially ignored and ridiculed,

her theory of endosymbiosis is now widely accepted as fact.

“The completely self-contained ‘individual’ is a myth that

needs to be replaced with a more flexible description,” Margulis

wrote, with her son Dorian Sagan, “Each of us is a sort of

loose committee.”

This state of nature is one of interpenetration and mingling

that defies easy categorization. It occupies a middle place, both

in the material reality of the world and in our understanding

of it. To Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet and philosopher,

this middle “is not halfway between two poles; it is

porousness that mocks the very idea of separation.” He

describes our collective biological reality as a state of

“brilliant between-ness” that “defeats everything, corrodes

every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses

out every confident line.”

What if, Ernesto wondered, this was the key to Boquila? What if

its flexible appearance was an expression of a flexible

holobiome? He conceived an experiment.

It is very important to understand the

experimental design. There's this Boquila plant mimicking

other plants. So we'll focus on one particular interaction —

Boquila and this tree called Rhaphithamnus. So Boquila and

the tree. We spotted this tree with Boquila growing onto it.

And specifically, we took leaves of Boquila doing the trick, I

mean, leaves of Boquila resembling leaves of the tree.

And — this is very important — leaves from the same individual

Boquila that we're not mimicking the tree leaves. So we have

these triplet. Leaves of the tree, Boquila doing the trick,

and Boquila being just the standard Boquila.

Zoë Schlanger: Each pair of Boquila leaves, both mimicking

and non-mimicking, were picked from the same vine, and the same

distance from the tree. They gathered these three sets of

leaves from 5 sites, and brought them all back to the lab.

We analyzed the communities of leaf endophytic

bacteria,

Zoë Schlanger: Leaf endophytes are the microbiome of the leaf.

The bacteria living within its tissues.

There is not one species of bacteria, there's

hundreds.

Zoë Schlanger: Ernesto’s hypothesis was that if the

microbiome played some part in Boquila’s abilities, then the

community of bacteria in the mimic leaf should resemble that

of the tree, and differ significantly from the

non-mimic.

And that's exactly what the results showed.

Zoë Schlanger: The leaves that successfully mimicked the

Rhaphithamnus shared 255 distinct species of endophytes —

more than triple those shared by the non-mimicking leaves.

I think this is strong evidence of the

involvement — I cannot say more than that — the involvement

somewhat of bacteria in this phenomenon of leaf mimicry. One

possibility, I think, is that in a way, these microbes partially

control for instance, leaf shape, and this opens the avenue

for research on this direction of genetic control, epigenetic

control by bacteria and so on.

Zoë Schlanger: Ernesto is hinting at something with

profound implications. He suspects that bacteria and

viruses exert influence on the shape of all plants — perhaps by

ferrying genes and RNA directly, or perhaps by selectively

activating or silencing pre-existing parts of the plant

genome.

What literature tells us is that microbes are

able to modify gene expression of other organisms. This can be

airborne, like a bath of microbes, cloud of microbe,

whatever you prefer.

Zoë Schlanger: The holobiome makes it difficult to delineate

where one organism ends and another begins, metaphorically,

but also very literally. What lives inside also often lives on

and around. Each of us creatures, like Pigpen from the

Peanuts, a blurry cloud of activity; a burst of flavour in

the atmospheric soup.

And then we are forced to conceive that all

plants are constantly exposed to this process.

Zoë Schlanger: But why then just Boquila? Why aren’t all plants,

or animals too for that matter, integrating each other’s

features on contact? Well, we can’t know for sure that they

don’t — at least on some subtle level. Boquila itself was

described by Western botany in 1782, and it took us more than

200 years to notice it could do this. Could there be other

mimics all over the world, hiding in plain sight?

Or is Boquila simply unique, and particularly porous? Maybe most

plants only speak in the holobiome code of their own

species, while Boquila cracked some universal cypher —

permitting its appearance to be overwritten by its neighbours,

for its own adaptive advantage.

In the first paper ever published on Boquila’s mimicry,

Ernesto and his colleagues measured how copying the leaves

of its surroundings correlated with less herbivory. From this

view, Boquila’s talents could be the undirected outcome of

natural selection — agency and intelligence not required.

One experiment poses a threat to Ernesto’s microbial hypothesis.

In 2021, a study was published claiming to demonstrate Boquila

growing on, and mimicking, a plastic plant. Of course, such a

synthetic model has no holobiome to offer, and the authors

claimed it as a strong support for plant vision.

However, this paper was met with criticism. Ernesto felt that the

experimental controls were very weak, and took issue with the

analysis. The study was a collaboration between an

unaffiliated independent researcher — an amateur

scientist — along with a student of František Baluška. František

himself is editor-in-chief of the journal in which the paper

was published, drawing complaints of an undeclared

conflict of interest.

But all the negative attention hasn’t discouraged František and

his student, Felipe Yamashita, from looking further. František

reports that they have yet-unpublished data detailing

how Boquila is capable of mimicking nothing more than a

photograph of a leaf.

František Baluška: Yes, because we have no data that the Boquila

is mimicking, not only a plastic houseplant, which is published,

but we have now data that it is mimicking even pictures. So, if

you provide the Boquila with the pictures of leaves, different

kinds of plants, then the Boquila start within two, three

days, making some mimicking of these pictures.

Zoë Schlanger: Ironically, František and Ernesto have a

very similar intuition about why the other’s hypothesis is wrong.

That is, the sheer breadth of Boquila’s ability to emulate.

František Baluška: Because the Boquila is mimicking many

physical parameters, it is mimicking the shapes, color,

texture, size and so on. So, it is not easy to transmit such

information by some kinds of bacteria. And even if there are

some different bacteria on mimicking leaves like on the

non-mimicking, it is not any evidence that the bacteria are

having something to do with the mimicking. For me, this story is

really not able to explain everything. I think it is only

possible with some kind of the vision

I would say very lightly, "Show me the

pictures." Because there are no pictures in that paper. If

Boquila is mimicking plastic plants, this is very easy. Take

a picture and show it to us, as I've done in every paper or

article I have written.

I am a scientist. I want to understand. I don't want to be

proven right. I don't want to be famous. I want to understand.

Hopefully be able to see the solution of this mystery within

my lifetime.

Zoë Schlanger: One of the strangest things about Boquila

isn’t the plant itself, it’s the near total lack of research

attention. To the few scientists attempting to tease out its

mysteries, even Ernesto, it remains a side project.

This may partly be lingering skepticism or trepidation from

within the scientific community, but it’s also partly practical.

Boquila is just not easy to work with, compared to typical

laboratory plants — so called “model organisms”. So far, it

has been challenging to grow from cuttings in a greenhouse,

although František says they are making good progress. Still, the

patchiness of its mimicry challenges traditional

statistical methods.

For the time being, Ernesto and František may disagree on the

most promising mechanism to explain Boquila. But they share

at least one thing: an admiration for the 20th century

philosopher Karl Popper.

Popper is widely held to be a father of the modern scientific

method and its premise of falsification. Briefly, he put

forward the idea that scientific theories are never really proven

to be true, they may only be falsified — or in other words,

disproven. According to Popper, science does not sit upon a

bedrock foundation of truth. Instead, the great scaffolding

of all scientific theory is supported only by pilings in

swampy ground. To quote Popper, "the piles are driven down from

above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or given

base. And if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because

we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are

satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the

structure, at least for the time being."

So we will always have more questions than answers. Are

plants more akin to us than we have been prepared to admit? Or

are they different in ways we will forever strain to imagine?

Can we call them cunning in their own right? Or will such

language always be too human?

We share our planet with and owe our lives to a form of life at

once alien and familiar. On what basis do we owe them our respect

and appreciation? In the words of ethnobotanist Timothy Plowman

"They can eat light. Isn't that enough?"

The more we learn about plants, the more their complexities seem

to multiply. The swamp, it turns out is full of life.

Zoë Schlanger is the author of “The Light Eaters:

How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New

Understanding of Life on Earth”.

And in which the story of Boquila is just one

chapter. “The Light Eaters” is available now, wherever you get

books.

This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by

Mendel Skulski, and me, Adam Huggin

With music by Modern Biology, Mort Garson,

Hotspring, Thumbug, and Sunfish Moon Light

Cover art by Ali Silva

And with special thanks to Fiona Glen, Gianni

Fontana, and Eden Zinchik.

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