Lessons to Learn from Fascinating Ferns
Jacob Suissa’s new book delves into the history, evolution, and adaptability of ferns.
Jacob Suissa is known for his enthusiastic approach to teaching about botany, both in the classroom as a professor of evolutionary biology at UT and through the non-profit “Let’s Botanize” social-media platform. He has now channeled that green-world energy into a new book about the complex history of one of the planet’s most enduring plants.
Ferns: Lessons in Survival from Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants hits bookstores on May 6, co-authored with Fay-Wei Li, an associate professor at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University. It is illustrated in great detail by the award-winning botanical artist Laura Silburn.
Suissa and his co-author wrote the book to share their fascination and delve deep into the surprises that ferns have to offer.
“When my interest in plants started to unfurl (pun intended) I was really struck by the juxtaposition between my original views of fern biology, and the reality,” he said. “As may be true for many of us, I initially thought of ferns as being ‘old and weak’ plants, relics of their former glory—often restricted to shady and wet environments. But the reality is that ferns are extremely diverse, there are over 11,000 species—several thousand more than all mammals combined, including us humans.”
Fern Biology Navigates the Centuries
Discussion of ferns often finds them overshadowed by more complex-seeming plantlife—those with seeds, flowers, and fruits. Suissa sees these as not more sophisticated but just having different ways of living. It does not translate to being better or more evolutionarily adaptive.
“If ferns are so simple and less adapted, how then can they have persisted for so long relatively unchanged in certain key traits?” said Suissa. “I think what their story tells us is that evolutionary success is not just about diversity, but persistence, and this is not always apparent.”
Fern diversity and longevity add to botanical mysteries that compel scientists like Suissa and Li. Ferns can grow in a wide array of ecosystems, including rainforests, aquatic environments, mangroves, and even in deserts. Based on the fossil record, ferns have been around for about 400 million years—persisting through nearly every one of Earth’s mass extinction events and climatic shifts.
“There is likely not one single reason for why ferns are resilient and adaptable,” said Suissa. “They may have duplicate copies of genes that can be evolutionarily co-opted to do other things. In other cases, it may be due to their reproduction, growth form, or physiology. Many ferns reproduce by freely dispersing spores, untethering them from animal symbionts. Many also grow clonally through long creeping underground stems. In other cases, their persistence could just be due to chance events—historical contingencies in life’s saga.”
Through their passionate approach to their subject matter, Suissa and Li seek to offer valuable insight into not just ferns, but the greater evolutionary picture of Earth’s botanical past, present, and future.
By Randall Brown