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Eats shoots and leaves: secret lives of plants
By Bob Beale
August 26, 2008

Dr Angela Moles Dr Angela Moles

A vast botanical study comparing 75 different ecosystems across the planet is revealing a wealth of surprising new facts about the secret lives of plants and what eats them - and some important lessons about how they will fare with climate change.

The brainchild of a UNSW evolutionary biologist, Dr Angela Moles, who personally visited every one of those ecosystems over a two-year odyssey across the planet, the results of the World Herbivory Project are still being analysed.

But the landmark study is already yielding some fundamental insights and previously unknown patterns in the way plants vary between warmer and cooler parts of the world.

$20,000 Women in Science award

Dr Moles's outstanding research project has been recognised publicly with a $20,000 award as one of four 2008 L'Oreal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships.

Among the early findings by Dr Moles and a colleague, Dr Will Edwards of James Cook University, is that most vines are left-handed: that is, they twist anti-clockwise irrespective of  whether they grow north or south of the equator.

After comparing the seeds of almost 13,000 plant species, Dr Moles has also discovered that seeds in the tropics are, on average, 300 times bigger than seeds in colder places, such as the northern conifer forests.  She has also assembled a database of the relative heights of about 22,000 species.

She has also found that in the tropics plants have to cope with being eaten more by animals than do those further north or south in latitude.

Her findings have important implications for understanding how plants and the animals that depend on them will be affected by climate change: one goal of the project is to use the large body of data she has amassed to create computer software that will enable better predictions to be made about how ecosystems will respond to global warming.

"These are fundamental facts that nobody had ever really put together before," Dr Moles says. "That may seem surprising,  given the long history of science, but these were questions that simply had not been systematically studied.

"If we don't know this sort of basic information about plants under today's climate regime, then we're in a really poor position to predict what's going to happen when the world gets warmer."

Dr Moles says the field research was arduous but exciting: "I went to north-west Greenland and looked at plants two centimetres tall, to the jungle in the Congo, rainforests in China and in Patagonia. One of the first things I had to do in Greenland was learn how to shoot a rifle, in case of hungry polar bears."

Dr Moles is a member of the UNSW Evolution & Ecology Research Centre, within the School of Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences.

More details: for video/audio interviews click here

 

Media contacts:

UNSW Faculty of Science: Bob Beale - 0411 705 435

L'Oreal Fellowships: Megan Ryan - 0400 641 737 or Niall Byrne - 0417 131 977.

 

Funding: This research is supported by an Australian Research Council grant.