To get by in the waterlogged, low-nutrient soil of the Quebrada Chorro forest in western Panama, a species of tree fern repurposes its dead fronds, turning them into roots.
The discovery “was completely serendipitous,” says James Dalling, a tropical forest ecologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, Dalling and colleagues were on an expedition to study how the roots of the tropical conifer Podocarpus acquire nutrients when the team came across a dense brush of Cyathea rojasiana tree ferns. The researchers tried to move dead fern fronds out of the way and found that the leaves were rooted in the ground. “We would have missed it
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