Science, Space and Technology News 2024
A new study has discovered that both ferns and flowering plants evolved nectaries simultaneously around 135 million years ago, suggesting a parallel evolution in their mutualistic relationships with ants, which has significant implications for understanding plant evolution and interspecies interactions. Credit: University of Tennessee, Knoxville
These relationships are well-documented in flowering plants, but they also occur in non-flowering ferns. This is weird news for researchers, as it has long been thought that ferns lack the nectaries for such complex biotic interactions.
The second new element is how it all happened. Ferns originally flourished as terrestrial plants, growing on the forest floor. They transitioned in a major way in the Cenozoic Era, around 60 million years ago, becoming epiphytic, or tree-dwelling, plants.“We discovered that as ferns left the forest floor and moved into the canopies, either as epiphytes, climbers, or tree ferns, they tapped into the existing ant-flowering plant interactions and evolved nectaries,” said Suissa.
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