The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

by Zoë Schlanger

Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder. First of all, they reproduce using spores, not seeds. But here’s the kicker: they have swimming sperm. Before they grow into the leafy fronds we all know, they have a completely separate life as a gametophyte fern, a tiny lobed plant just one cell thick—not remotely recognizable as the fern it will later become. You’d miss them on the forest floor. The male gametophyte fern releases sperm that swim in water collected on the ground after a rain, looking for female gametophyte fern eggs to fertilize. Fern sperm are shaped like tiny corkscrews and are endurance athletes—they can swim for up to sixty minutes. You can watch them squiggle under a microscope.

If weighed, plants would amount to 80 percent of Earth’s living matter.

A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive.

Every native plant on Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i’s fourth-largest island and Perlman’s home base, is a mind-blowing stroke of luck and chance. Each species there arrived on the island as a single seed floating at sea or flying in a bird’s belly from thousands of miles away—more than two thousand miles of open ocean sit between Kaua‘i and the nearest continent. Botanists believe one or two seeds made it every thousand years.

This, Gianoli thinks, could be what is going on with boquila. Genetic material from microbes could be controlling the part of a plant’s genome responsible for leaf shape, and nearby boquila could simply be picking up on the same interference; being showered, as it were, with foreign microbial genetic material.