It’s got to be one of the coolest field trips for budding scientists—a week on a subtropical island investigating the behaviour of plants.
And not just any plants. Among those studied are the staghorn ferns growing wild on Lord Howe Island in the north Tasman Sea, about 700 kilometres northeast of Sydney. They are giving experts new insights into the evolution of life on Earth.
A team led by Professor Kevin Burns from the School of Biological Sciences has found colonies of the fern on Lord Howe that cooperate and display behaviours more like those in ant or bee communities.
The phenomenon, called eusociality, is a major evolutionary transition towards more complex life forms.
“But it’s only ever been observed in animals, and has only evolved on a handful of occasions. To see this in plants is really exciting and will require a significant reappraisal of plants and the evolution of life in general.”
Major evolutionary transitions occur when independent entities begin to cooperate.
There are eight commonly recognised major evolutionary transitions in the natural world, of which eusociality is the most recent, he says.
“Eusocial animals differ from others in three fundamental ways: they live in colonies comprised of different generations of adults; subdivide labour into reproductive and non-reproductive groups; and care for offspring cooperatively.
“Our observations over the past two years on Lord Howe Island have found that staghorn ferns meet all these criteria.
“These plant colonies usually grow on the branches of rainforest trees, with individual plants collaborating to build a communal store of water and nutrients to help ensure their survival, working together like honey bees in a hive.”
“These plant colonies usually grow on the branches of rainforest trees, with individual plants collaborating to build a communal store of water and nutrients to help ensure their survival, working together like honey bees in a hive.”
Students taking a third-year paper, Island Biology, usually go to Lord Howe in July to study how plants and animals evolve after colonising islands. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has put a stop to that this year.
Kevin says the island has been closed to tourists for most of 2020.
“So we’ve postponed the trip until this summer, when we are going to visit some islands locally, including Matiu/Somes, Kāpiti, and Ward. Next year, we might go to the Chatham Islands, if we still can’t get to Lord Howe.”
As well as staghorn ferns’ social lives and life history, Kevin has been studying ‘island syndrome’ more broadly.
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