Ep. 514 - Parent/Offspring Conflicts in Moss

Hello everyone and welcome to the In Defense of Plants podcast, the official podcast of In Defense of Plants.com. What's up? This is your host Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? Conversations like you're about to hear do not happen unless you support In Defense of Plants and one of the best ways to support the show is to become a patron over at patreon.com/in Defense of Plants. By supporting the show with a little financial contribution each month, you can get access to things like bonus episodes and we're running a really fun series right now where the wonderful Sarah Johnson and I learn how to garden better. But speaking of excitement, today is so cool. It's so weird. It's so alien and it's happening all around us. If you've read my book, you'll know that Mossex is a very weird topic because they're doing things so different than what you'd expect out of something like an animal. Joining us to talk about this is Dr. Jessica Budgey, who is particularly interested in parent offspring conflicts. Yes, conflicts between Moss, parents and their offspring. It's so weird, as I mentioned, but it's so fascinating and it's really, really, really fun to talk about. So let's not steal anymore for Thunder. Let's just jump right into it without further ado. Here's my conversation with Dr. Jessica Budgey. I hope you enjoy. All right, Dr. Jessica Budgey, welcome to the podcast. I can't wait to pick your brain today. But first, let's start off with an introduction. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do. My name is Jessica Budgey. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee here in Knoxville. I'm a PhD in laboratory focuses on mosses and some folks work on some other bryphites. And we're really interested in plant structures and how they function and also their evolution. Excellent. It's a really fascinating world that when you start thinking about plant structure, mosses kind of get breeze over. People can generally recognize, oh, that's a moss. But the structures are best appreciated in the macro. When you get into that macro world, my omai isn't an elaborate and fascinating place to be. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons I got into mosses is because I love microscopes. And the more you zoom in, the more amazing the details are. And telling them apart is all about the details. Excellent. Yeah. I love that sort of detail oriented science, especially because it's a labor for me. I don't take to it naturally and to learn how people like you think and approach things really opens up new doors of like, wow, I wonder what it must be like to be in your head or see things through your eyes kind of thing, which is cool. But mosses, I mean, again, many people can recognize them, appreciate them, whether they know what they are or are not. But was that always the case? I mean, where you, did you start in mosses? Were you a plant person that found mosses? Were you a nature kid that just had to find something to do in mosses somehow managed to find their way into your life? Where did this begin for you? Yeah. So, I would say definitely a nature kid. I was in the Girl Scouts growing up. We went camping lots as a family. And so we were constantly sort of outside hiking and being outside in the summers. I passed out at the side of blood. So the whole studying animals and being a doctor was like off for me. Good to know. Right? So like plants were great. They're gooey and weird inside, but it doesn't cause me problems. Right? So, yeah. So, I went to the Missouri Botanical Garden with my family for a vacation when I was in, when was it? Probably high school. Yeah. The Wantsom is a wonderful garden when I was in high school. And I thought it was amazing. Like, that was my first big exposure to like plant diversity on a huge, and I thought they were amazing. I'm like, there's these crazy lily pads and all these enormous trees. And I was like peeking in the windows too, you know, on a Saturday. The researchers aren't there, but I'm just like peeking in the windows to see like, can you see the scientists doing their work? And so that's sort of where I caught the plant bug. And so, you know, my mom's a nurse. My dad was a minister. I'm like, I want to maybe be a botanist. And so, my mom volunteered at the Cincinnati Zoo in Botanical Gardens and they have a center for, yeah, so they have this amazing, so, you know, you mostly think of zoos as places for animals. But they're the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens. So they also have plants there and they had a center for research of endangered wildlife. So my mom volunteered there and I got an internship in high school working in the plant department, which was super fun. I spent a whole summer building seeds for tropical plants. Okay. Yeah. So, tropical plants there, seeds don't survive, desiccation and freezing very well. And so, for their frozen garden, you would isolate the shoot apical meristem, put it in a gelatinous bead, dry it down and then freeze it and basically like build yourself with seed. This was an internship. Yeah. That's, yeah. That's what we did in high school. Okay. That's right. That is so cool. Yeah. It was super fun. Though the crazy thing is I spent the whole summer trying to figure out if we could make the process go faster. The answer at the summer, end of the summer was no. I had like, I give this whole presentation with all my negative data and I had zeros everywhere. And it was no big deal. So for me, it was like, wow, you can have zeros and fail and it's not a problem. And still do stuff. Okay. So, yeah. So, that's how I got into plants. Yeah. It was super fun. And my mom volunteered there for years. Yeah. So, the people that I worked with as, you know, high schooler, I'd known them since I was like a girl scout, someone cookies to them. Yeah. So, it was like this family affair almost of like the community kind of took you in and ushered you through this whole process. And I mean, that's one of the cooler origin stories I've gotten on this show is that kind of exposure that early on. And I love that it started with a botanical garden and went directly into conservation. And you know, from there, you, the world's your oyster, right? Like, you know, you want to do something and at least you had a lot of really cool sort of background to bring to the table and go, what do I do with this? Yeah. And it was really great because at the time it was the summer internship, I mean, it was paid. The University of Cincinnati had like a Howard Hughes initiative for high school students to do research. And so like I plugged in through that and actually got paid for the summer, which is pretty rare. Oh, that's excellent. Yeah. That'll definitely sweeten the pot for anyone looking to go into that field. Well, I think that those sorts of programs that help support young scientists who are interested in gaining experience is just can be really critical in life changing. Definitely. And I mean, even if it's learning that, hey, no results are still results that tells a story or, hey, I really don't like this. You know, that to me is another great way to learn through trying is what don't you like as well or how different can this world be thinking that most of what comes through at least to the general public. I'd like the Eureka success stories, at least that's the way they're told oftentimes. Yeah. And that I talked to my students about the grittiness that is needed in science, that you will struggle, you will fail, you will have to repeat things and you have to be willing to like hold yourself gently, go home and cry, have something to eat, have a beer, talk to someone and come in tomorrow and do it again. Right. Right. And also recognize that that's cool in and of itself. I mean, in the moment, it's drudgery and it can be a slog and you got to show up sometimes, but it's always that like five mile view of like, wow, I get to do this, you know, that can really make a year, multiple years where the struggle feel kind of privileged in a way. Yeah. And one of the things I love about mosses is that there's such an underdog, right? Like, not a lot of people study them. So oftentimes the questions we're asking in our research are things that like, maybe people thought about, but like no one's done this work to answer this question before. So it's really exciting. It's frontiers. And again, it's a frontier that I can go out in the backyard and see a tree with moss on it. And who knows what kind of questions have or have not been asked about that species. So with that in mind, I mean, obviously you've had this great introduction to plants. You knew you wanted to work with them. How do you go from, okay, I want to do this to graduating going to college and finding your way into the moss world? Was it an A to B to C or did you kind of have to be introduced to mosses in its own way? Yeah. So I did my undergraduate degree at Miami University in Ohio. They have a bot, they had at the time a botany program there. So it was a botany major. And I immediately joined a research lab. The research lab I joined was Dr. Jim Hickey's lab and they focus on ferns. And formally, people call them fern allies. I don't like that. It's a little too worry for me. I call them fern friends. That works too. Yeah. So they were. done some ISO EATIs, they're called QuillWords. And so I started an undergrad project working on QuillWords and while I was an undergraduate, I want a super well-known biologist, so researcher studying Mosses, Howard Crum, who was at University of Michigan, passed away. And so with his big discussion in the Furn lab of like, "Oh man, Howard Crum passed away and there really aren't enough people studying Mosses." And like, they're such an underdog and like, and I was like, "Wow, maybe he's just studying Mosses." Like, "Wow." Like, "Date, like need me." And "I will do that." Right, and so that's that sort of how I got into it. So then I started like looking at them, I'm like, "Oh, okay, let's let's look at them more." And I started working on IDET learning to identify them and looking at them under the microscope. And they were also at lots of the field sites would be looking at Furns, there'd be Mosses around. And I love things that are are underdogs or understudied or that people aren't looking at. And so yeah, I just got into them. And then yeah, and then the next step was like, "Oh, I like this still enough. Let's go to graduate school." And it's part of the steps where you keep making decisions and you keep having fun. And you're just like, "Well, guess we're doing this. Like let's keep going." Yeah, why not? I'm not stopping. Yeah. And so, so yeah, so I guess that's how I got into it was sort of this inspiration of not enough people working on these organisms and me wanting to like speak for them and study them. And then the whole loving of microscopy and the microscope. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a field that like goes hand in hand. Just the techy side, but also the botanical side and just novelty of it. And under appreciation doesn't even begin to sort of scratch a surface of like how they're viewed again. We can probably find plenty of people that can go, "That's a moss." But like, okay, which one? You know, "Oh, there's different types of moss." would be probably the next thing you'd get out of most people you stop on the street. Like I didn't even know that. Yeah. And then you tell people there's 13,000 species of mosses worldwide. Maybe up to 15,000. Yeah. Right. Then it's it's just goes from this fuzzy green background that's on the rocks and trees to like you zoom in and you realize like, "Oh, wait, that one and that one are different." And that one and that one are different. And that one and then you turn around and look around in the forest and you've got 40 species around you. Yeah. And they're all different doing interesting things. And that's to me where you start to go, "Okay, why is there so much variety?" Like something has to be different about each one of these for them to be distinct or at least to have evolved down that pathway. And then you hit that whole like hook of their history, right? Like how long the moss lineage has been around. I know it's a tough thing to talk about in super scientifically accurate ways, but they're like a very early diverging lineage of plants that have just truly stood the test of time. Yeah. So they split from the lineage that led to vascular plants about 450 million years ago. Oh, that's it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They've been on their own like evolutionary trajectory for that long and that includes the the mosses and liver warts and horn warts. They're all sort of those close relatives. Yeah. Collectively. Now like when you say "briophytes," you could mean anyone in that group, right? Like that's kind of the catch-all term for. Exactly. "Briophytes" is the biggest term that you would use to describe, yeah, mosses, liver warts and horn warts all day. Okay. That's helpful. Yeah. Because that gets branded around and it's one of those you don't stop to think about too much unless you're really talking to someone like you. But speaking of you, like when you think about jumping into this world of mosses, this group of underdogs, like how did you bite off what you were going to do? Like what really kind of attracted your interest to a group that's understudied, underappreciated? How do you how do you approach that as a scientist in your lab and moving forward, really? So I think I kind of approach it through reading. I did a lot of digging back into old literature as a graduate student. I took a German translation class and learned how to translate like old German literature from the 1800s. Right? Because if you have some idea about mosses or ferns or morphology, probably some German person thought about it. So I think I used a lot of that as inspiration and I sort of feel like when my inspiration either comes from literature and reading or like being outside and looking at the plants. So the inspiration for my PhD was that there was some old German literature looking at it's called the calyptra. So if you think about your CMOS out in the wild, you see a leafy green moss. And that leafy green moss is called the gamete fight, one set of chromosomes in all of its cells. And when they reproduce, they'll make a sporophyte. So it'll be a little stock with a capsule at the top. And the calyptra is a cap of gamete fight tissue that covers the apex of that little sporophyte as it's developing. Okay. And there were some ideas about how it worked. They were like, oh it's covered in waxes. And the way I think about it is a reverse shower cap idea where you washed your hair. It's nice and wet in the morning. And your parent is like, oh put the shower cap on your hair, keep it nice and moist. So your hair doesn't dry out otherwise you'll die. Oh. Oh, thanks mom. And so yeah, thanks mom. Or maybe your mom is both your mom and your dad so it could be your parent. You're better. Yes. But yeah. So the all this German literature from the 1800s said, this little cap important for protection. You take them off the apex dries off the capsule doesn't form. Don't make spores. That's really bad. But there was actually no evidence of how these little caps worked in terms of them being covered by waxes. So one of those things were just somebody said it and then it got repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated with no evidence. Wow. And it's like this horrible telephone game. So for my students, I mean, like, yeah, when you read something and it sites some other paper, you got a dig dig all the way back to actually figure out is that just an idea or did they run an experiment? Right. Right. Yeah. I've seen that a lot of times in the orchid world is right, but that someone, you know, when the 1800s said something fanciful and it sounded good enough that no one questioned it, right? And so that brings up a really good point about a lot of plant literature. And I'm sure other, you know, biological fields run into this as much as you but plants being so kind of underappreciated and mosses, especially do you find that it's a lot like other areas of the botanical world where yeah, someone touched on this subject in maybe the 1800s and then radio silence until, you know, maybe now. Correct. And I think I think you do went into that a lot more in fields that have fewer people in them. Right. So for those collector studies, people had said things in the past, but then the most recent person prior to me that was focused on studying them was in the 1970s. Wow. A whole series of cool experiments from the 1970s and then and then radio silence until I did my PhD in the early 2000s. Dang. Okay. So yeah, it's a lot of vacancies. Yeah. And it's just a lot of numbers, right? If there's not a lot of people doing it, you can only tackle so many things in a career, let alone, you know, when it's two of you or something, but this whole idea of the the the moss reproductive effort is fascinating in and of itself, because as you hinted, they're doing weird things, right? It's not something that lends well to the animal model that we will readily recognize. You know, and just the fact that when you're looking at a green tuft with those little stocks on it, you're looking at genetically distinct individuals that are relying on each other. But if you looked at them from a DNA perspective, it would have you scratching your head unless you had some background there. Yeah, exactly. And so and I think that is part of the reason why maybe people have an easier time learning about animals, right? We are animals and so it's easier to sort of make this identifying connection or understanding their life cycles, whereas understanding plant life cycles takes a little more work. Right. And what so the way I think about those, you know, we've got our little green tufts, we've got our little stocks with our capsules. The way I think about them is imagining that your kid lives in your attic and eats out of your fridge in your it's entire life. For some listening? No. Yes, yes, it's like physically attached to and nutritionally dependent on the leafy plants for its whole lifespan, including that little like cap of tissue on the top, but it also has to get all these resources. So a lot of what we've been thinking about in my lab is is that capsule with a stock? Is that sporify doing its own photosynthesis? How much photosynthesis is it doing? How many resources does it need from its parent? And then you run into these ideas of thinking about parent offspring conflict. So if the parent is making a single offspring this year, but it needs to make an offspring next year as well, it can only give so many of its resources to its offspring. It has to survive until next year. So how many resources does it give so you can make spores and survive and be successful, but reserve enough so that you can make it to the next year. And so thinking about conflicts over resources and difference. species with different morphologies. And then we've been thinking lots about, do you see a morphological arms race in terms of structures that would make it so you can steal more out of the fridge versus like keeping the offspring from stealing as much out of the fridge and you know, locks on the fridge, you know, timers on the fridge, like what would you do to sort of keep your offspring from getting too many resources or how could you try to sneak around and steal more of them? - Wow. - Again, when I first stumbled into your work, the hair on the back of my neck stood up because it really starts to peel apart what it means to be a living thing on this planet. And the fact that, you know, I go reading sci-fi because I like to escape the mundanity of being an animal. But this stuff is happening in our yards, in our neighborhoods, right, and this is wild to think about. But, you know, there is some corollaries we can draw there, you know, there's fish and frogs that just out into the universe and say, "Go fend for yourself," right? There's some parental care, I know. But, you know, that's a way of getting away from conflict with your offspring, you know, parents inevitably, some of us kicked out of the house, right, after a certain age. We're a drain on resources. And so it makes sense that that would be somewhere in the plant world. It's just happening in such a bizarre way because of that connection, that reliance on a direct, I'm growing out of you kind of scenario. - Yeah, and it's just that like physical connection throughout their lifespan, that sort of makes this conflict an interesting one to study. - Yes. And so this cap, you said the cap on top of the cap soul. So you have it sitting on top of the sporophyte, is it detached from the rest of the gametophyte? Is it just like literally physically like a cap that you'd put on your head? - Correct. So it forms early in development, but it disconnects from the rest of the little leafy gametophyte. And essentially this little cap, so the term for it's a coliptera and it comes from like a Greek world meaning veil. So this little coliptera cap is physically detached from the rest of the gametophyte, but it's haphoid, right? It's this like parental investment. And eventually once it disconnects, it's essentially dead. And so they ran some cool experiments in the '70s where they took off the caps and they boiled them in a bunch of solutions and then put them back on. And they worked just fine. - Wow. - So it's really just this like physical structure that's covered in waxes that's helping to prevent the apex from drying out. And you need it big enough to like protect your apex from drying out, but then the parents might be making them even bigger to keep the resources from being stolen as much. - Oh yeah, a lot to impact there. So essentially this is an early investment as the sporophyte, after fertilization sporophytes beginning to form, it's in place for shooting up. But here's the other weird part that gets into my head is we're talking non-vascular plants here. And a tuft of moss I can get my head wrapped around of having a microclimate being able to use osmosis and maybe something approaching a pseudo-vascular to transport water. Now you add a sporophyte, which can oftentimes be, many times taller, that's gotta complicate some things. But the moss is not getting around unless the spores at the tip of that dang thing disperse into the environment. So what's going on when we start talking about just vascularization? 'Cause everything you're talking about nutrients, water, whatever this thing may need, or try to be stealing, it has to get it first. - Yeah, and so, so right. So you talk often about bribes as being non-vascular plants. Really, it's just that they don't have lignin. They have lignin-like compounds, but they have cells that move water around and move sugars around internally, both in the leafy gametophyte and in the sporophytes. So the way to think about it is that the gametophyte is doing all the water absorption, and then it has to be funneling the water into the sporophyte, where there's often a conducting strand with, they're called hydroids and leptoids, which are these cells that are moving waters and sugars around through internally through the stock up to the castle. - Yeah, yeah. - Because essentially the stock and the capsule are covered in waxes and they're not doing water absorption. - Oh, okay. So this is one way he sort of, well, two way street, really, but, you know, dang, okay, that complicates things. Well, it's good to know too. Like, a lot of times we get really hung up on the technicality of the definition itself, like lacking lignin, okay. Something has to be working though, because otherwise, you know, it would be a dead end. So yeah, it's good to know. So when they, when they call them non-vascular, I'm like, well, maybe you should call the other plants tracheophytes, 'cause they have trachefids and they have lignin and they're very specialized, but bryophytes do have water conducting cells and it's interesting they have them in and they've evolved multiple times. So water conducting cells have evolved at least twice in mosses and at least once in liver warts. - Nice. - So it's just these idea that like, there's a problem where you need to move water around through your cells and just going cell to cell through typical little perincomacels is not very efficient. So building cells that are longer and skinnier and you've gotten rid of all your cell contents and your dead at maturity and essentially you've built a pipe is an efficient solution that evolution has resulted in multiple times. - Right, right, it's this idea that like, is it always about a one recipe for success? There may be limited different ways to do it, but there are different ways to do it or it can denovo a couple different ways if the right kind of ingredients are there. Whew, that's heavy. (laughing) - Yeah. - So with that, you're thinking about where you're at, you know, doing your PhD, you're now running your own lab. How do you bite off a side, how do you approach this? I guess is what I'm getting at here because what you've just talked about, there are so many levels of cellular mechanisms, chemistry gradients, you know, that you can really start to think about entire, you know, that's why you have lab members, right? Just taking different pieces of this puzzle. So what part of this unknown really got your interest and kind of has been your focus? What are you trying to tackle in this system? So I think we're really trying to figure out how species with different morphologies might be doing some of these relationships differently. So the stocks with the capsules, the sporophytes, come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. So we're looking at the like water conducting cells of sporophytes with different morphologies to see how the morphologies of the different cells, so those water conducting cells, how they differ across species could be influencing how the resources are moving. And yeah, running your own lab, I'm not in the lab as much as I would like or hardly at all anymore. So I have a technician who's working on doing a lot of the water conducting cell anatomy, Amy Okafor, and then one of my PhD students, Isabel Hildesheim, is looking at basically labeling carbon to look at how the carbon's moving between the gametefights and the sporophytes. - Okay, so this really does involve a lot of, like my crops could be, but molecular techniques to try to really tease out what's going on at any given point in time. - Right, so we're doing, so not so much molecular, I guess, what do you call them, like the technique? They're more chemistry techniques, actually. - Fair. - So you use like stable isotopes and have heavy carbon, so carbon 13, basically you can load in the carbon 13 into the gametefights, so it does photosynthesis, picks up the carbon 13, and then watch it moving into the sporophyte. And so it's a lot of dicing up tissues and then doing, analysis of the tissues to figure out how much of this heavy carbon is actually in different tissues to figure out the speed at which it's moving between the two places. - Cool. And are you doing this with multiple different species? It's the one that really lends well to this, and is there a serious horticultural element to this, because a lot of people have tried to grow moss and failed miserably, so you at least got to be able to do this in a lab I'm assuming, and that means cultivating them. (laughs) - Exactly, so the main model organism moss is fiscometrium patterns, and so that's the first moss that had its entire genome sequenced. And within the family it's in is the funerary AC, and so if in this family, the vast majority of the species are annual mosses that grow on soil. And so we can basically grow them in the laboratory and get them from spore to spore fight in somewhere between, depending on the species, three months to nine months. And so we basically have little terrariums, we grow little forests of gametophytes, we put them in a cold chamber to simulate fall conditions, they make reproductive structures, we flood them, then we pull them back to the warmth and get them to develop spore fights. So we have this constant production of spore fights, and I think we're right now up to 12 different species. We have actively growing in the lab that have different morphologies. So my research specialist, Alex Dowd, he's working on just like keeping all the cultures running and getting new cultures going so that we constantly have more species with different morphologies to run experiments on. But you're totally right, like a lot of the, People when they're doing a quarter culture projects, like, ah, I got this. big rock in my yard and it's new and I want mosses growing on it. And the problem is is that mosses on rocks are really hard to grow. Yeah. Whereas like the soil mosses that we grow that are annuals are easy. Also many of the rock species are perennials and so these like longer term slower growing mosses are kind of hard to establish. So we definitely have a system that we're working on that's amenable to this experimentation in the lab. That's nice though and it's really exciting because okay we're finding things out here in this system. What does that mean for this system? What does it mean for those old growth ones that are dangling off a tree? It's that sort of stuff and that's where you know kind of going back to what you had said earlier is you got to get a little bit of grit because there's always going to be unknowns and there's always going to be challenges to how do we even approach this. But if you're curious enough it can also be a really exciting thing to just go well I love that there's so many unknowns there's so many things we get to think about and maybe try to approach or get innovative about down the road. And I think the challenge the challenge is to focus right? It's at peace that like there's all these questions and all the things that I want to do and then it's like okay what can we actually get done? Right. What are these attainable projects? So yeah so a lot of it is focusing on this experimental work and then the other thing we're doing in the laboratory lots is a lot of the work we do is sort of in a phylogenetic context. So we're either building phylogenies to sort of understand more phylogical evolution and that's sort of another piece that we've been doing and so we've been thinking about parent offspring conflict and how it may be different in different species across the phylogeny and sort of looking at its evolution. That's neat. Yeah because evolution works really good with hard selection and there's a few things as hard selection is what affects your reproductive output. Exactly and just having this like direct fitness measure right? Like making spores is a critical step. Despite the fact that lots of bryophytes reproduce asexually you know you can dice off a leaf, put it on soil, lots of things will regrow but getting that genetic recombination like that's what it's all about. Definitely. And so with that in mind I want to come back to the capitula because how everything you've talked about the complexity of it all the the push and pull the tug of war between parent and offspring how does a dead piece of tissue influence that you know what is the size of it the shape of it how can that feed into this competitive environment if it's dead and inert. Yeah right this idea that like yeah the coliptor is this like tiny cap of tissue and so one of the things I did for my PhD was basically demonstrate that this little cap is covered by waxes. Okay. So it's actually sort of like water proofed essentially and I did an experiment um part of my PhD where I took the caps off I rinsed them in chloroform and ethanol and water and then put them back on and basically when you remove the waxes from the caps they don't work as well so you apply a desiccation treatment and the little spore fights can't survive right they have to have the sort of water proofing function. So it's sort of like the the fact that the coliptor is dead is sort of less of a problem because as long as it's covered in those waxes it should be working but remember 13,000 species of mosses so coliptor come in a bunch of different shapes a bunch of different sizes there's a couple of families that have hairy coliptor that are like covered in hairs and so one of my PhD students Michelle Kennedy is interested in figuring out are these hairy coliptor covered in waxes or they not covered in waxes and how to sort of the heriness add to the function of the coliptor is it sort of additive where it has hairs and waxes or is it more of a tradeoff where if you have lots of hairs you have not as many waxes again different ways to maybe deal with desiccation or loss of some sort but coming back to the whole stealing part how is it influencing that what role is it playing in this this tug of war in terms of is it literally just controlling how much water and whatever can leave the spore fight and that's where a lot of this this this tug of war comes into play exactly so so when you think about the coliptor in early development it's important for protection but then later on in development as the capsule starts to expand you have this transpiration pull where you can imagine like the evaporation from the capsule is pulling up more water from water more nutrients more resources from the maternal plant so if you put a bigger cap on top you can slow down the waterfall at least that's our hypothesis like we we're still trying to figure out how important that is for that part of the competition but that's that's our hypothesis right now and we have some evidence looking at it across the phylogeny that species that have um separate males and separate females we would expect more sexual competition right so if you are a hundred percent related to the parent you're attached to you would expect less competition with your only 50% related to the parent you're attached to you'd expect more competition between your your fathers genes and your mother's genes are in conflict right your father's genes say steal all the resources your mother's genes they don't quite steal all the resources and what we see is species with more genetic conflict have bigger morphologies you have bigger spore fights and bigger coliptor so this like more philagical arms race where like they're building bigger coliptor to slow it down they're big building bigger spore fights to steal more whereas we see don't see this same relationship in the species where you could be a hundred percent genetically related to the parent you're attached to right it's like everybody's on the same page with how many resources we're getting and it's fine and so there's sort of less conflict so so that's how we think it's interacting and it's so weird to think about this because of the differences in the genetics going on between the gamutophyte and the sporeophyte because just the fact that you're deployed I'm guessing deployed in the scenario right as a sporeophyte you've got a different complement to genes different genes are definitely going to be active if you're a completely different type of organ than what you're growing out of so how does that all start to play into this this competitive landscape and yeah just thinking like oh we could be a hundred percent related if it's you know mom and dad are fertilizing each other right here or yeah oh man it's so much more complex right and it's and I think and I think you you think a lot about parent offspring conflict in animals right like about you know which birds in the nest get more food or more resources or more care and you don't think about that as much but it's going on silently and quietly out in the yard among your mosses right like the conflict is happening and it all stems from the fact that this is a sessile organism right there is no active fighting or I can move I can be a little bit louder to get more food from mom you know it's it's a sessile organism and not only that it's an organism whose next generation ushering in is growing out of it so that is only going to make any strategy seem that much weirder to get your head wrapped around yeah and and just that fact that they're physically attached to each other means that there's no there's no walking off and acquiring more resources or being independent that's just really different in the briathites opposed to like ferns and gymnast firms and angios firms now this is something I've always wondered and I probably could just google it but you're here so that's more fun is that physical connection between a haploid and a diploid version of those that that phenotype right what does that look like I mean is it literally growing out of the archagonia and that like is it a cellular growth that there's some weird sort of like mislatoey sort of high-fay that get in there or what yeah yeah so so we have that discussion sometimes in my lab is thinking about like we had this whole discussion about is it a parasite right like but then it's like well not really because like parasites are usually not the same species right this is your offspring so like you do want to survive and essentially what happens is right the fertilization happens inside the archagonium you produce a diploid it sort of starts off as you know tiny completely surrounded by the maternal tissue disconnects with that cap on the top and then as the sporophyte grows not only does it form a stock and a capsule above but it forms what's called a foot and so essentially it the species the sporophyte penetrates into the gametophyte and then some species have bigger bigger foot regions smaller foot regions some of them have transfer cells where you sort of see interdigitizations between the gametophyte and the sporophyte imagining sort of increasing surface area for loading in more resources and pulling them up so that's one of the other things we're going to do is we're going to do a little bit of the research and we're going to do a we're interested in looking at are not only how the conducting cells might be different across species, but how might that foot anatomy be different? If you're trying to steal resources, maybe it's all happening at the foot level. You dig your foot in deeper to the parental plant. You have more surface area and you can access and acquire more resources from the parent. Bazaar, but such a good application for your love of microscopy, right? So, yeah, so we do a lot of things where we're fixing, embedding, slicing, making slides, staining, either for light microscopy or zooming in with a transmission electron microscope. Sort of get at, you know, because not only is it how tortuous the cell walls are to increase surface area, but cells can be more cellular active and have more endoclasmic particular, more mitochondria, more sort of activity that could be helping with the loading of those resources. We want to the other. Like geographic specialization within the unit of the plant. Right, and just like zooming in on all those cells. And so, yeah, so we get to do a lot of fun microscopy in the lab, which I really like. That is so cool. So, you're studying this conveniently in a, you know, a sort of annual system where you can get that turnover and have units already pretty regularly. I know there is a great difference between the reproductive output and really just the whole shebang surrounding annual and perennial flowering plants, right? In terms of investment into reproductive just volume. How much would the system differ if you were looking at something perennial? Has there been work at looking at mosses that live a little longer or something to that effect? That's such a good question. And so, the mosses we're looking at that have the hairy colic draw. Those are perennials that are from collected in the field. So we're able to like look at the hairy colic draw and some of the wax chemistry of them. But you would have to catch for all the other development things. You'd have to catch them once a year when they're making sporophytes. It doesn't make for a fabulous, reliable PhD practice. If you could only like do your field development things once a year. So I think it's going to be a lot harder for us to understand what's going on in the perennials. I think we're either going to have to practice more with culturing them and see if can we get some species to grow in the lab. And maybe that's going to be one of those things where the beauty of being a professor is like, I'm going to hopefully be a professor for the next 20 years. So over the next 20 years, we figure out what's going on with all of these perennials. Can we get them growing in the lab? Can we try to understand what's happening with them? The other piece I'm super interested in that we haven't gotten to dive into yet is all the, these annual mosses we grow in the lab. There's a one-to-one relationship. There's one sporophyte attached to one gametefite. But there's some mosses that have these sprawling gametefites where there's multiple sporophytes attached to one parent. So now you don't only just have parent offspring conflict, but now you have kin conflict. Oh no. Where you can be competing against your brothers and sisters. Oh no. Where are the resources, right? But so I don't know. So maybe I start collecting data once a year as things develop on some of these perennials feces, but I'm going to need the next 10 years to get enough data to really understand. Sure. But that's why when the administration's like, what are you doing? I am no shortage of ideas. I just need time and funding, right? But that is so strange to think about. And it just keeps coming back to plants have to survive, just like any other organism on this planet. They just do it so differently. But all of them, if you're willing to look, all of those principles we really recognize in animal systems and kind of take for granted are there. They're just so strange to think about. Yeah. And you just have to wrap your mind sort of around it differently. But there's, you know, because there's a bunch of other researchers in my department who are also thinking about parent offspring conflict, just they're thinking about them in birds or in bats and sort of these other systems. So when you are having coffee in the morning or going to some sort of function with your department or you're around your colleagues, is there more recognition? It's kind of like, you know, we've got way more in common than we do a part as people in society. You know, is there that recognition or is it kind of one of those like, wow, that's different? Oh, I never even thought of that. Are you learning from each other or sometimes it's just so kind of out and left field that it's just trying to get that understanding first before you can really start kind of sharing in this world of parent offspring conflict? Yeah. I mean, I think I think it's mostly about showing up and having those conversations with your colleagues because because you're right. It's not as obvious when it comes to how parent offspring conflict might be working in plants. And so I think my animal biology colleagues maybe just don't know about it. And so instead, I'm like on a educational mission where, you know, whenever we're grabbing coffee, I'm like, oh, let me tell you about this one thing. And then, and then once they realize I'm actually thinking about lots of the same questions they're thinking about just coming at it using a different organism, then it opens up all these super exciting conversations because we are grounded in thinking about biology and reproduction and parents and offspring. And that's like super common sort of unifying ways to think about. Yeah. Plants and animals. And I would imagine depending on, you know, what your colleagues are studying, you know, maybe having a farther advanced understanding in a different system, you know, the literature is asking questions, at least the theoretical approaches that could frame the next, oh, interpretation of why, why would this be? Or maybe we have to think of the capitulant in a different way. So that's where I would think that a lot of the fertilized sort of thought processes really start to cook between everyone. Yeah. And that's the fun about being in an academic department where everyone is working on diverse organisms, right? Like, we're all sort of coming at them from these different angles and potentially asking similar questions. Very cool. And so the other side of this, like you said, sort of earlier in our conversation is being outside. That's part of this, right? Trying, and I understand like the pressures of where you're at in your career probably have you in front of a computer more often, but when you do go outside, I mean, that's got to be just so many more new questions to ask because mosses are doing different things in different places, having different strategies depending on what kind of substrates they're growing on. Like, how much benefit is the natural history side of just hiking even to what you're doing day and day out as a researcher? Oh, I think it's, I think the hiking and being outside and being around the organisms is really essential for the inspiration and the ideas, right? And the thinking novel thoughts. I mean, a lot of the things we're growing and we're experimenting with are growing in the lab, but it's just nice to be outside and get to pet some moss, right? And it's like interacting with them. Yeah. And it becomes sort of this like friend of friend sort of thing where I would assume you start looking at them like, oh, there's so many similarities, but what are you doing different? Why are you over here and not over there? You know, and I would assume it all has to start with the spore, right? That's how they get there. And that is where it comes right back to what you're doing is how are those spores even made and allowed to escape in the first place? Yeah. And it's crazy, right? Some of those little capsules can have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of spores per capsule. And so like, when I'm hiking outside, I'm just imagining that like, we're just covered in spores all the time. And that's just moss spores, right? That's not. Birds, spores, and fungus spores. But like the spores are everywhere. And the crazy thing is is that you don't see mosses on everything, right? And there's also, you know, some species are growing only grown trees and some species only grown rocks and some species only grown soil. So like that spore from that one tree growing species had to land on a tree and then germinate and grow. And those spores probably landed all over the other places. But since those weren't the habitats that that species is optimized more and evolved to sort of be growing in, they don't grow there, right? So whenever people are trying to, you know, get mosses to grow places they aren't, right? Like, I don't know if you've seen, if you Google how to grow mosses on things, there's all these methods about buttermilk. Oh, got it. You find up your moss and buttermilk and you paint it on the wall. And then, and then the next picture they show is this like beautiful script of like some mosses are amazing like on the wall. And that buttermilk technique they did is kind of real, right? Mosses are, all moss cells are totipotent. You can take a single moss cell and it can regrow a whole moss plant. But if moss was going to grow on that concrete wall, it would be already. The spores are everywhere. It's just there's not enough moisture. And that picture they showed you where they said they painted on the wall. No, no, they took a whole sheet of moss, probably pillaged from somewhere in the wild, cut it into the shape and glued it on that wall. Yep. Yeah, I got con into the buttermilk method early on and all I ended up with was a very gross moldy wall. It was gross. I don't recommend it. Yeah, though there are some really exciting methods, you know, because they are trying to integrate more green spaces into urban planning. And so there are some fun things where there are, you know, plants up the sides of buildings and they are coming, they have invented some interesting tiles that hold a lot of moisture so they can have like, imagine having moss colonies growing on all the sides of the buildings. But then those tiles hold way more water than a normal concrete, piece of concrete would. And so then you are changing the little micra habitat and then they are going to be happy and you are going to have more luck with them that way. Yeah, the only way I grow moss is I put something wet out and just let it take its course, right? I let it grow moss, I let it volunteer and then try to make sure it is happy. Yeah, so there are some fun moss landscaping books. My favorite is I think it is called Moss Gardening by Annie Martin and Annie is great because she does moss rescue. So when there is going to be a development coming in, Annie goes in advance, pulls out all the mosses prior to development and then moves them in and does landscaping. And so that is what I usually encourage people to do is like if you want moss growing in a particular place in your yard, figure out where it is already growing in your yard, your neighbors yard and start moving it around locally and then maybe you can add some shade, add some water, get it happening, happy and do some moss gardening. Yeah, and that is a really good point to bring up is, you know, I dabble a bit in sort of the creator world of like miniatures and stuff like that. Moss poaching is real, it is unregulated and it is rampant. Like please don't just go willy nilly digging moss out of the woods. Like go rescue it if you have to try to cultivate it if you have to but boy, you could do some damage to moss populations and the ecosystems that rely on them by digging moss out of the woods or anywhere. And so when people are selling like moss terrariums online, I have a lot of concerns. I'm like, where did that moss come from? And also when you think about some of those perennial mosses, like some of the, I think the favorite one they use are called the little pincushion mosses. It's this little tough to sort of minty green moss. And some of those cushions can easily be 20 years old, 25 years old. Like would you take a 25 year old elephant and put it in a jar and watch it slowly die on your counter? No. No. But why are you going to do that with this poor little moss? Yeah. A lot of those, I mean, some people maybe great and have good success with terrariums, but my guess is the vast majority of them don't go very well. And yeah, you've pill it. A moss has been taken from the wild for your enjoyment. And that's why I promote, go outside and pet a moss. Yes. You want to interact with moss. Get yourself outside. Mosses are amazing to pet. Enjoy them. You know, take off your shoes and socks and walk on them if you want. Really have like a personal experience. Right. Bring a hand lens. Get to know them. Like that's going back to everything we've talked about. The minutia is where the fun is because when you get down on that level, the variety of shaped structures, strategies really become more apparent. And that's where a whole new world is unlocked. And you don't have to go far for it. You know, I can walk down the street and on a brick wall near a drainage pipe, there are mosses I can go Google it. The neighbors are going to think I'm weird, but they already do. So, you know. Yeah. And my favorite places in urban environments is to look for air conditioner drip zones. Oh, yeah. Those are great places. And then there's also, there's a fun species called the silver sidewalk moss, Brian Argentium. And that often is inside walk cracks. Right. You can just like check out the sidewalk cracks and see mosses. And so there's, there's a lot of, you know, urban moss looking that you can do in addition to sort of getting out into more wild areas. Definitely. And with that, I think we have tackled some very complex stuff. If people want to learn more about your specific world of research, where do you want them to go looking? So, we do have a lab website. So, if you go to the ecology and evolutionary biology website for the University of Tennessee Knoxville, you can sort of check out some of our research there. But that's mostly if you want to dive into the science of it all. And we've got our papers posted up. One of the things we do participate in every year is what's called the spring wildflower pilgrimage. So it's been going on for 75 years where in the springtime people come to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and go on hikes about bears and birds and ferns and mosses. And so my whole laboratory will be there later this spring leading moss walks. Excellent. That's a really fun event. Beautiful place, wonderful place, and to be able to learn as you're seeing all of this wonderful natural bounty is just fantastic. But Dr. Bucky, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us about this. I know these are weird times, but people like you keep me inspired to keep all of us really jazzed on what's going on out there because it's still going on whether we're happy or sad. And I really appreciate you taking the time to do it. And also for all the work that you and your lab and your colleagues do. Yeah. Thanks so much, Matt. Enjoy the podcast and hearing about other folks work and it was great to talk with you today. Thank you so much. Well, in the meantime, hang in there. Thanks. All right. I bet you'll never look at moss is the same way again. Parent offspring conflicts. Who would have known, but it's everywhere outside and the fact that it's happening in moss is something you could go out and see on a tree underneath an air conditioning unit is just mind blown. And I really think Dr. Bucky for taking time out of her very busy schedule to talk with us about it. As always, I put all of the relevant links for everything we talked about today in the show notes over at indefenseaplants.com so that you can learn more about this topic and every topic that we feature on this show while you're over there. Look at all the great ways you can help keep the show up and running because I can't have conversations like this without your support. As I mentioned at the beginning, you can become a patron over at patreon.com/indefenseaplants. I also have copies of my book for sale stickers and customizable merch. All of those links are in the show notes over at indefenseaplants.com. So go check it out and consider supporting the show today. At the very least, make sure you hit that subscribe button and keep checking back in. But in the meantime, I have a shout out to the latest producer on this podcast. A big, big thank you goes out to Alex who signed up over at patreon at the producer credit level. So not only is Alex maximizing their support of the show, they are maximizing the kickbacks they are getting, including access to those bonus episodes I told you about. But anyway, thank you all for listening and supporting the show. Until next time, hang in there, stay healthy and get outside if you can. This is your host Matt, signing out. Audio, everyone.