Pteridology (FERNS) with Fay-Wei Li

Oh, hey, it's your old roommate who always found the best furniture on the side of the road, Allie Ward. Did you know that you love ferns? Not yet.
Sit tight. You're about to.

I'm going to tell you one person who loves ferns. It's this guest.

In fact, I first saw this ologist in this quick video about ferns, and they were wearing a shirt that said, I heart ferns, but the heart was a fern gametophyte.

You're going to find out everything about that later. And they said that ferns were fern-tastic.
This is in the first five seconds of the video, and I was like, they're on.

And they wrote the 2025 book, Ferns, Lessons in Survival from the Earth's Most Adaptable Plants. And they're an associate professor at Cornell's Boyce Thompson Institute.

They got their PhD in ferns at Duke University, where they're also a scholar in residence. And we'll talk about their stories and their history and their deep love of ferns in a moment.

But first, thank you to everyone who supports the show via patreon.com/slash ologies, where you can join for a dollar a month and you can leave questions for the ologists ahead of time.

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happy to have you here. And Blue Dot Rose, happy to have you and your sister here in Spirit.
Okay.

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Okay, let's jump into pterodology. So the pater

comes from the Greek word for a wing or a feather. So like pterodactyl or helicopter, helico, which means spiral, and pater, which means wing.

So, if you didn't know, yeah, the pater in helicopter is its own word in there. It's weird, but ferns look feathery.
So, people who study them are officially on record as pterodologists.

And so, let's illuminate the shadowy world of ferns to hear about their long evolution. What ferns not to have in your house? Icons to fern scientists.
Haploid, diploid, spore packets.

Do they have roots?

How ferns can teach us about sexual identity, the most expensive ferns, the tastiest ferns, the trendiest ferns, mathematical mysteries, and a genome that makes no sense to me at least with the absolutely charming, enthusiastic scholar, professor, researcher, fern advocate, and pterodologist, Dr.

Fei Wei Li.

Where are you right now? I'm right now in North Carolina. I'm actually in the process of moving my lab to Duke University.
Does North Carolina have good ferns?

I feel like I don't even know if North Carolina has ferns. Yeah, I mean, North America in general is not a great place to find ferns.

The most exciting place in North America to find ferns is in the desert. What?

No. Yeah.
Yeah. Arizona, for example, has one of the highest fern diversity.
I thought ferns needed a lot of darkness and water, and those are like two things Arizona does not have.

Well, so they have a, what we call a calamphoid ferns. They are desert ferns.
They adapted to this really dry environment and they really took advantage of it and took off.

They diversify so much diversity there. What do they look like?

Usually they look really crispy. They can lose their water up to 90%

and they can still come back alive. So if you, for example, have a hike in the deserts in Arizona, Texas, whatever, you see some crispy ferns, put them in a Ziploc bag or pour some water over it.

They might come back. Just green it up.
Oh my gosh. Does moss do that as well? Can't moss like dehydrate and rehydrate a lot?

Yeah, yeah. In many ways, they're like mosses, they're resurrection ferns they look dead but then they still can come back well what a name what a compelling name like zombie coming back from the dead

when i think of a fern i think of these dark forests and i think of like

deep gullies and streams and wetness and stuff but

what exactly is a fern like they're a plant but they're not like normal plants right not like the plants we're used to yeah i mean there are many ways to define a ferns you can define it by looking at what it doesn't have.

They don't have seeds, they don't produce flowers. But the most definitive way to define a fern is their sex life.
Let me hear it. Okay.
Well, they don't have flowers, right?

And flowers where the sex happens. The sperm will fertilize the egg,

you have the next generations. Ferns don't have flowers, and the funnier ferns you see outside are diploids.
They have two sets of chromosomes, like flying plants and humans, for example.

But they have this entirely different generation that we call the gametophyte phase and a gametophyte is a haploid so diploid di2

means two copies of a gene and haploid means one copy most of your cells are diploid but gamete cells like sperm and egg are haploid because they're going to hook up with each other so ferns have this stage gametophytes which means like a sexy plant and it's easy to remember because gametophytes typically look like little green hearts or sometimes they look like an oven mint, which I guess is sexy depending on who, where the person is wearing the oven mint.

But yeah, gametophytes, structures of sexual independence. And they're independent.
They live outside of the diploid ferns. They're green.

They're usually super tiny, smaller than your fingernails, for example. And this is where the sex happens in ferns.
Nine of flowers, but in a gamdophyte phase.

And does that come out as the spores that you see that powdery brown stuff on the back of the leaves? Right, exactly.

So the spores will germinate into gamdophytes, and the gambdophytes are free-living. They will produce egg and sperms, and they will fertilize and have become a zygote.

And the zygote will become, you know, the ferny ferns you see outside. So they basically have two independent generations, the haploid phase and the diploid phase.

And is this an older type of reproduction, or is it just just divergent evolution or is this something that's kind of ancestral?

Only in ferns you have these two separate generations living independent with each other and that's what makes them unique. That's exactly defines a fern.
What is their basic anatomy?

Do they have a rhizome or do they have roots if you had to like give the basic parts of a fern?

Okay so I guess the text for ferns will have a horizontal rhizome and the rhizome you can think about is a stem. And then you have leaf which is a fern fronds coming out

and then beneath it you have the roots so a rhizome a stem roots coming down and the leaf coming out okay that's a basic principle there and the roots are true roots uh they are not like a bryophyte root which is a rhizoid oh okay so that's a misconception that they don't have roots they have proper vasculatures in their root system Nice.

So yes, ferns have roots, but they also have rhizomes that act like a stem, but they look kind of like a clumpy knob at the base of the fronds.

And then below the rhizome, you have the actual roots of the plant.

Obviously, with over 10,000 species of ferns, we're not going to discuss every fern, but we can get the broad strokes, especially between the mossy or bryophyte-looking little gametophytes, which are tiny, and the frond-looking adult sporophytes.

I love also that you call them mossy mosses and ferny ferns.

Like to get an idea of what they look like. And the fern gamblophytes or the haplophytes, they do look in many ways like a braophytes.

And we had a great episode about moss a few years ago, and I'd never considered what their life cycle was like or how rich in diversity they are and how you can go up close to one and just see so much that you would overlook unless you had a loop and stuff.

But have you always been like a plant person? Or did you get into this via the spore angle or what made it so that you are an expert in

the world? I'm a pterodologist.

Yes. Yeah.

So I grew up in Taiwan. There's just so many fern diversity in Taiwan.
So to put it into perspective, Taiwan has 800 fern species. Taiwan is like a third of a third size of New York State.

The whole North America has only 400 species. So this tiny island has double the fern diversity compared to USA.

And so I just really got really fascinated about the diversity of ferns.

My parents have a little cabin in the woods, and I spent a lot of time in the forest looking around and just realized there's so many of them.

And I just wanted to identify them, learn more about them. And that's how I've become hooked with ferns.

Did your parents get you plant books? And were they

come back to the house with like all these plants?

They did, they did, they gave me many field guides, and that's yeah.

I feel like with ferns, there is something really beautiful about doing spore pressings and like the preservation.

Do you find when you're doing this research, do you have to go back in archives to see specimens that were collected a long time ago that are pressed? How are you even researching and cataloging them?

Yeah, we use herbarium a lot. So, herbarium is like a library of dead plants.
It's really a magical place.

So, it's a place you basically have physical plant materials from around the world and from different plant lineages, and you just go to different cabinets and you can pull them out, you can look at them very closely.

And so, we spent a lot of time in herbarium looking for characters, trying to identify different species of ferns.

We also were able to find some new species just by looking at the old herbarium specimens. No, how how do you tell? Are you able to take a little fragment of it and do any DNA now on it?

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. That's the beauty of herbarium specimens.
They preserve so much information. The DNA you can get, we can get DNA from specimens as old as over 100 years old specimens.

And they have the locality, we know where they come from. They have the spores, right? We can look at the spore morphology.
So yeah, herbarium is very important for botanical research.

And in the past, we have discovered several new species. So before you discover something new, right, you got a chance to name it.
And

yeah, one time we

discovered a new genus and then my advisor and I, we decided to name it after Lady Gaga.

So

the genus is called Gaga. No.

Yeah. That's amazing.
Was your advisor a Lady Gaga fan or did you know that like this is a good move for ferns?

She's a deep Lady Gaga fans.

The two things we talk about when I was a graduate student is her cat and Lady Gaga's newest album.

Did Lady Gaga ever find out about that? Yes, she was interviewed several times, and people asked her about the Gaga friends. And yeah, she acknowledged this.

And the Gaga friends would describe they have a really odd reproductive methods and they bypass a lot of sexual reproductions.

And so Lady Gaga made a comment about the Gaga ferns saying they are sexless. And one of the researchers spearheading this 2012 naming was Dr.

Kathleen Pryor, who was inspired in part by the sequined light sea foamy green and heart-shaped bodysuit that the pop star had performed in.

And also the DNA of this genus of 19 different ferns has some repeating pairs of GAGA or gaga. And Dr.

Pryor also said that the naming was in honor of Lady Gaga's quote, fervent defense of equality and individual expression, and that they think her second album, Born This Way, is enormously empowering, especially for disenfranchised people in communities like LGBTQ, ethnic groups, women, and she added, scientists who study odd ferns.

And while Lady Gaga has identified as bisexual, she's also been quick to note that she doesn't represent the LGBTQ plus community and just just speaks up for equity and freedom of sexual expression.

And there were also earlier in her career rumors of her being trans, and her response was usually along the lines of, so what if I were?

So fern cometophytes make male and female sex cells proof that nature is not on a binary.

And so now you're saying that they have kind of like a sexless reproduction, but I'm wondering like, because the spores always get me with ferns.

I think that's one of the things that's most interesting.

When you are looking at spores, say under a microscope, do they have a lot of different morphologies that determine what happens in their different like diploid and haploid phases?

Or is a spore, is a spore, is a spore? Do they all look the same?

Spores contain a lot of information. Different species, different genera have really different ornamentations.
Sometimes they have pores on the spore walls, and those are very important characters.

And the size are important too. Many ferns like to become a polyploid, so they duplicate their genomes pretty often.
So they have four copies of chromosomes.

Many of them even have 12 copies of chromosomes. And when they do that, their spores become very big.

So we can measure the spore size as a proxy. of how many set of chromosomes they have in a genome.
So to recap, those little bumps on the underside of a fern leaf, those are called sori.

And each one has little orbs, which in turn house the spores and when the time is right the spores pop out like someone from a giant birthday cake and they find a wet spot to germinate into that gametophyte with little root like rhizoids and these can make the haploid sperm or eggs and when a sperm finds an egg through a film of water then you get the diploid parts of the life cycle as the fern leaves begin to sprout and grow.

The gametophyte shrivels up at the base. As that fern plant begins to grow up, the cycle starts again.
But yes, chromosomes in ferns, it turns out, can be wild.

And do people who are researching ferns, such as yourself and your lab, are you going about it from that genomics? Are you in it for the chromosomes and the reproduction cycle?

Or are a lot of pterodologists in conservation and taxonomy of it? What makes a fern person kind of come alive with their research?

Yeah, so in the past, we've done many different aspects of fern biology. We've done some taxonomy, we describe species, looking at how those different

species relate to each other. And nowadays, we focus a lot on their genomic side.
You know, ferns are weird. There's a fern species called Ophioglossum, Ratiglotum.
It has 1,400 chromosomes. What?

So, humans are 46, right?

What? And then this guy has 1400 chromosomes. And just why? Why do I do that? And their genomes are huge as well.
So, you know,

DNA is composed of ATGC, right? Four different letters. And humans, for example, have like three billions of different letters.
So most humans have 46 chromosomes, 23 pairs.

And each chromosome in humans can have up to 300 million base pairs. And the base pairs are the rungs of that spiral ladder of DNA.
And A pairs with T, C pairs with G.

So our genome contains over 3 billion base pairs of those letters. But this fern species has 160 billion letters.
It's like a lot bigger than a human genome. Why? Right?

And that's something we want to figure out. How do I do this? So unraveling that DNA mystery.
That's in the future of ferns. But what about tales of ferns past? Were they one of the earlier plants?

When we see drawings of like dinosaurs surrounded by ferns, is that pretty accurate? Did they predate flowers by a lot? Like flowering plants? Well, yes, I know.

So ferns are both really old and also really young. Tell me everything you know.
They are old in a sense. You can trace the whole lineage back to Copenhagen, like 300 million years ago.

And that is the time that ferns really dominated Earth. The coals we're burning now are coming from ferns and their ancient relatives.

so you can think about ferns that are fueling the civilizations of of human beings wow anyway so they dominate earth and then in cretaceous like a hundred million years ago flying plants come along and they are bad they are bullies they push ferns out so they become the dominant actors of a forest and then ferns have to figure out what to do next.

So they went understory

and they're kind of staging a comeback when they were understory and they adapt to the really low-lying environments and they flourish and they diversify in the low-lying environments.

And so most of the fern species, most of the fern lineage we see today are actually really young. Yeah, younger than the flowering plants.
Oh, because they had to adapt to it. Exactly.

We call them the diversify in the shadow of angiosperms, in the shadow of flowering plants. Wow.
Yeah, so they're young. I had no idea.

I always thought that they had been around forever and it must have just been darker then, which is not right. You are wrong.

So ferns themselves have been on Earth for 400 million years, but they have adapted to temperature fluctuations and they've kind of rebranded as understory, low-light champions in some cases, once the angiosperms or the flowering plants came in and ruined their whole vibe.

Do you get a chance to go back to Taiwan and are you just like ferns, ferns, ferns, ferns? Do you go back and you're just like, ah, finally, some good ass ferns. Yeah, yeah.

Every time the

sheer number of species just blew me away again and again.

Walking the little trial, you see a hundred of species.

It's fantastic. One thing I miss a lot in Taiwan is the food.
And

you can find fetal heads in Taiwan, and then people cook it. And it's pretty common.
And they're really, really delicious. What's the best way to eat a fiddle head? Okay.

I guess I need to clarify. So not all fetal heads are edible.

Some are alright toxic and carcinogenic. In eastern US, in the spring, you will go out and pick fetal heads, right?

So just make sure that you pick the right ones. Don't pick the toxic ones.

But the fetal heads we eat in the US, for example, is the species Comatsusia Sruphiopteris. The common name is ostrich friends.
And the best way to cook it, I think, is first you need to blanch them.

They're very tanning, a lot of tanning. I just want to get rid of them.
And then I will add some butter, some feto heads, some shrimps, some pasta together, mix it up.

It's good. It's crunchy, but also a bit slimy.
So it's like really interesting balance that I really like. Kind of like okra, like a little bit.
Have you ever had okra?

Okra is too slimy, but I think feto head is, yeah, like the crunchy bit is better.

Do a lot of animals go out munching on fiddleheads? Who eats ferns in terms of like evolution?

Ferns are famous for not being eaten. Really? So

I mentioned some fiddleheads, some ferns are toxic, right? And they are toxic for reasons. They don't want to be eaten.
Ferns are also very famous for having very little herbivory.

What does that mean? Don't get eaten.

Very little insect eat them. Oh, okay.
So if you if you go out, right again, go on a hike, look at all the fern fronts. They're usually intact.

And if you look at the flowering plants, the summons got chewed up pretty badly. And so the comparisons, the contrast is

pretty striking. And

the really cool thing about this is you can take advantage of this. So there's a big seed company called Corteva.
They produce a lot of coins and soybeans in the US.

And they got really interesting ferns because they realized no one eats ferns, but why? Right. And so they develop a very sophisticated screening pipeline.

So they're able to identify a number of insect cytoproteins from ferns. And they were able to put this in corns.
And the new generation of corn is super resistant.

to a lot of like foam armyworms and so on. So

probably

in the future, maybe the corns you are eating has a bit of fern DNA in it. Like kind of transgenic.
Transgenic, yeah.

Kind of, so you're eating a little bit of fern DNA, which then does that mean that they can use fewer insecticides

and pesticides on it? That's that's the whole point.

Wow. I mean, you'd think ferns have so many genes to spare.
You know, they have so many eggs for some of them. They're like, take a couple.
We're fine. You guys have 46.
We're fine. Yeah.

What about when it comes to ferns in the media? Ferngully, Land Before Time. Have you seen either of these? Do you ever notice ferns in like animation and you go, that fern wouldn't be there?

To be honest, I've heard about those movies, but I never watched them. I didn't grew up in the U.S., right? Yeah, yeah.

But

between two ferns, I guess that's the one I know.

Between two ferns. I'm your host, Kiana Reed.
I'm your host, Zach Alifanakis. And my guest today is Kiana Reeves.
Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me here.

On a scale of one to a hundred, how many words do you know?

One to a hundred.

Do you know 50 words? Do you know 75 words? They're funny as hell.

So the ferns in between two ferns, by the two ferns that sit

on the sides, they are Nepholipus cordifolia. So it's the common name of it as Boston ferns, or sometimes called the sword ferns.

And Boston ferns are kind of the most widely cultivated ferns in the entire world. It's so popular.

And the origins of Boston ferns is a bit unclear, but it was hypothesized that there was a shipment of ferns from Europe in the late 19th centuries.

And that shipment contains a lot of really weird varieties of Boston ferns. And some of them are stroopy, some of them are highly dissected, some are crested.

And a florist picked them up, and I guess a new house fan sensation was born.

And in the early 20th century, there was a report saying Boston ferns, there's over a million Boston ferns being sold and grown in just the eastern side of the US alone.

So that was extremely popular ferns back then. And still, I guess it's still pretty popular now.

Are they hard to take care of?

I mean, mean,

maybe

perhaps not. So I studied ferns by killing them.
Okay. I cannot grow ferns in the house.
My wife

just couldn't understand why a fern doctor keep killing her ferns.

You're not uncomfortable with dead plants, obviously, because you're around them a lot. So there you go.
It's like you understand the value of a dead plant also.

A lot of people see a dead plant and they say, oh no, this is a tragedy. But you say, this is an opportunity to catalog it.

If I'm good at it, I could have made a lot of money.

So I don't know if you've seen the staghorn ferns. So they're called staghorn ferns because they look kind of lobey, like reindeer antlers or a very large frise salad.

And colonies of staghorn ferns in the wild can divide labor with the upper fronds getting waxy and directing rainwater downward to spongier staghorns below it. But not in the wild.

Staghorns are the buzz of the plant world. There was a Better Home and Gardens article from August, and it gossiped that it's hard to find a plant as controversial as the staghorn fern.

It continued, while some adore its sculptural antler-like fronds, others shy away from its prehistoric aesthetic.

A recent glimpse into the terrace of Martha Stewart revealed a hanging staghorn fern as the ultimate natural statement piece, center stage. So, staghorns, the fern du jour.

It's getting really popular in Asia. So they usually are mounted on the wooden plaque and they have the angel-shaped leaf coming out.
So it's really like a deer mounted on the wall.

I guess in Etsy, you can get them for like 20 bucks. But recently in Taiwan, there was a new new variety of stack horn ferns that was sold

over 300,000 US dollars oh no so there's a total stack home fern craze fever

in some part of Asian countries right now so if I'm if I'm good at this yeah I mean I can make serious money You can retire early, but you can just volunteer at the lab.

Just do it for the love of ferns, but just like

from a yacht. Are ferns getting kind of a comeback or are there people who are just like diehard? Like, I'm a fern person and not an angiosporophile?

Do ferns have their like street team that loves them?

Yeah, so there's a American Fern Society, and I'm currently the president-elect of that society.

It's so fun to be around with firm people. I mean, in a botanical world,

the fern people have the reputations of being really rowdy and just like all stick to each other.

That's so cool.

You know, I almost named our dog Fern. I love the name Fern.
Have you ever met anyone who's named Fern?

Isn't that a great name? It was, yeah.

I mean, we have a daughter and then

I propose to my wife, maybe we should name it them her ferns. But then because I also been killing a lot of ferns in the house, so she doesn't feel it's a good idea.

She's like, we'll name her Maggie. We'll name her anything.

Anything. Daisy, something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something cannot be killed. What about, you know, speaking of dead ferns, like, how are they doing out there?

Yeah, it's a serious issue. There are a lot of endangered fern species.

To give you an example, there's, well, Halloween just passed, but if you walk around southern Florida, you'll be very lucky to see a spooky green hand coming out from a palm trees.

And those are like Caroglossa palmata. It's a very endangered fern species in Florida.
And it looks just like a hand dangling down. Super cool.

It's one of the reasons they got so endangered is because over collections, because it looks so weird. People want to collect them and then grow them.

It just doesn't grow well outside of the native habitats. And obviously, the disconstructions of the swamps, the drainage of swamps, also did also help.

Is there a way to try to cultivate those and reintroduce them, or is that just

really, really hard to do?

There are some progress.

So, in upstate New York, there's a very endangered species called Asplanium scolopandrium.

And this is a very common commercially available fern species. But those are coming from Europe.
So Europe have a different subspecies. And the American subspecies is extremely endangered.

But anyway, there's been some process of reintroducing the Native American ones to

the habitat.

And one 2017 thesis I read titled, Experimental Reintroduction of American Heartstongue Fern, Factors Affecting Successful Establishment of Transplants, noted that the reintroduction success varied based on partly how robust the little ferns were at the time of transplantation, and in the higher humidity sites, they tended to fare better.

And I looked up a 2025 paper and it seemed to find that while still threatened in their native Northeast habitats, the transplant efforts have been working.

So hooray for combating issues that we have caused. Obviously every year ecology changes more and more and it's interesting to think how much

you know one type of plant can tell you about what's going on in the environment you know as a whole. And we have some questions from listeners.
Can I ask you? Yeah.

Yeah? Okay. They have great questions.
better than mine. And we will get to your questions, patrons, in a moment, but first let's donate to a cause of the ologists choosing.

And this week, it's going to the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, which promotes research and teaching of taxonomy, systematics, and phylogeny of vascular and non-vascular plants.

And they provide early career BIPOC research grant funds, graduate student research grant funds, and more, plus more resources. And it's a pleasure to support them on behalf of Dr.

Lee and on behalf of Ferns the world over. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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And let's enter the overgrown forest of your questions. And let's see.
And on the topic of cultivation, we were just talking about that ghoul next door, Ashley doing,

Empress of Smallwood and Mish the Fish wanted to know. Ghoul Next Door said, I've tried to collect spores and grow them to absolutely no avail.

Is this a losing battle or is it a skill issue? How can I grow myself a fern forest?

And the Empress of Smallwood wanted to know, can you collect fern spores to germinate more spores, more ferns?

Someone else asked what they could do to prevent their native ferns from spreading through the rest of the garden. But

that I imagine just like you gotta pluck them. The father of Mish the Fish, looking at you and your ferns.
If you want a fern goalie, can you try to make one?

Yeah.

And so to germinate the spores, you really want them to be on a really wet surface.

So you can use a deadly container with some pea moss, maybe some really moist soil. And then you can sprinkle the ferns on top of them and keep the lid on so it's the whole environment is really humid

and

hopefully that can get you some little fern gametophytes so you'll see the fern gametophyte first so those are like mossy things coming out from the grounds they would not look like a ferns in the beginning you'll be looking at like really filmy uh green sheets on the soil But some ferns have green spores, like the matusia,

the ostrich ferns, they have green spores, which means that they have really bad shelf life. So, if you want to collect the spores, you better germinate them right away.

Just don't put them in the room temperature for too long. They will go bad.
So, do you kind of have to figure out which species you've got and then learn what works best for that species?

Is it going to vary a little bit? Definitely. Yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, on the topic of those gametophytes.
Hi, this is Tommy and

Mackelwrath. We want to know why ferns have done so well and lasted so so long evolutionarily over the years.

We're from Chattanooga, Tennessee.

And many more of you, including Jenna Yu, Maddie A, Good Soup, Moth, Katie Munos, Brenna Hull, Scale Bar, Amy Arugula, Clemens V, Redhead Scientist, and Matt Schmidt from Wellington, New Zealand, wanted to know.

What or how gametophytes give ferns a leg up in sexual reproduction? Thanks. What is it about them that has led to their survival? That's a great question.

So fern spores can fly away really far, can fly really far away, right? And then imagine you're a single spore just by yourself and you landed in a remote island and there's no one else there.

And the spore will germinate into a gambdophyte. And the gambdophytes are typically hermaphroditic, so they have both male and female parts.

So you can just self-fertilize yourself and you become a new fern. You don't need another partner because a single spore can colonize the whole island.
And that, in a sense, gives them a lack up.

Is there an issue then with whatever that reproduces reproducing like with itself? Does it become kind of cloned? Or is there like an issue with genetics? Oh, yeah, it creates a lot of issues. Okay.

Because you self-fertilize, right? You lose all the genetic diversity that way, the heterozygosity that way. So you're completely homozygous.
There's no diversity in your genome.

Every single locus, they are the same. So imagine an unrelated egg meets a stranger's fern sperm, and you've got a lot of variation, a lot of combos happening because they're heterozygous.

They're different. Now, if you're mixing with your own DNA, homozygous, you might have some weak spots where your haploid gametophyte DNA is doubling up with itself in the diploid phase.

Also, good job for knowing what all those terms mean. Look at how far we've come.
So that's problematic in the long run. But if you want to just colonize somewhere really fast, you got it.

Gets the job done. Yeah.

And Matt Schmidt is from New Zealand. Have you been to New Zealand? No.
Me neither. It's a great place to look at ferns.
They have so many cool ferns in New Zealand. That was my next question.

Andy Pepper, Ziz, Sarah Manns, Fiona Roji, Addie Capello.

All these people asked about New Zealand and ferns.

Ziz said, I'm so excited, OMG, as a Kiwi, why do New Zealand forests have so much silver fern when I've never even heard of tree ferns anywhere else? Sarah said, please talk about New Zealand ferns.

And then also Addie Capello wanted to know, culture-wise, like they've spent time in New Zealand and says that there's a lot of ferns integrated into the culture there.

And so what is it about New Zealand? Why is their fern game so strong?

I wish I worked in New Zealand as a fern biologist.

You know, so are ferns, right? It's everywhere. It's on the national, the area of New Zealand has fern fronds on them.
The Rocket Beach teams have the fern leaf on the jersey. It's amazing.

And according to the Museum of New Zealand, yes, ferns are a big deal. They're on military tombstones, they're on sports uniforms, coats of arms, currency.

And though though I have never been to New Zealand, I imagine they're everywhere in like cool murals and bus stops and clip art and everything.

Now, of particular acclaim are the black fern and the silver fern, the latter called pongo to Maori folks, which is native only to New Zealand and which can grow into this hairy kind of scaly tree trunk several stories tall.

And New Zealand, it's just lousy with ferns. Ferns everywhere in the best way.
Does New Zealand just have like great habitat for ferns? Oh, yes. And also, they have really odd ferns.

I guess probably because it was isolated a bit from the rest of the world, some weird ferns, you know, really appears in that place.

And so, kind of like what you were saying, if a spore lands on an island, turns into a gametophyte, then they can just colonize, they can just boom.

So, if they're in this sort of remote location, then you might just get all kinds of evolution from that. Yeah, exactly.

They kind of adapt to the various specific habitats and have interesting morphology. What about invasive ones?

Rhys Perini, Justin Bowen, Valbi Listening, Lisa Gorman, Potato Puffer, and Earl of Gramelkin wanted to know, in Rhys's words, are there invasive ferns?

And I know we mentioned earlier that that person's dad was like, how do I get rid of some of the native ferns, take it over my garden?

Because they're so good at that reproduction.

are there ever like whoa we got too many of this fern here there are several really nasty ferns so there's one species called ligodia microphilum it's native in asia but in florida is culling forest man this is weird fern so

it is a climbing fern so they they wrap around trees and they go up and the single leaf

the whole thing is a single leaf so they have the longest leaf on this planet because that whole thing is a single leaf. And they go up the trees and they strangle the trees.
Oh.

Each frond of this old world climbing fern, which can smother whatever was growing underneath its canopy, can be 125 feet long. South Florida hates these things.

So yeah, it's a horrible, horrible ferns. But in their native habitats, they are well-behaved.
Just for some reasons, when they arrive in Florida, they went wild. Springbridge.

So that's one.

There's another fern species called Salvina molasta.

I guess as the name implies, molassa is

not a good fern. This is aquatic ferns that float on top of water.
Oh wow. It's native in Brazil and it has caused trillions of dollars of damage around the world in Australia and Africa.

It just blocked the waterways. It can just cover the entire lake and then choke whatever's fish down there.
It's a serious problem.

Some ferns are not nice.

Some ferns are like, that's it. I'm taking over.
This is my tree now, Florida. Florida has some issues with pythons and all kinds of stuff.
It's wild down there.

Florida is just its own science experiment in terms of what's going on down there.

Well, but there are some weedy ferns that kind of

maybe

can save the earth a bit so this a fern called azolla it's also aquatic ferns it floats around 50 million years ago you know earth was a much warmer place and the arctic was actually a big freshwater lake and there was a huge azolla bloom during that time and with the geologists estimated that during that azolla boom, that fern bloom in the Arctic water, they sequestered over 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide.

And that that was hypothesized to facilitate the Earth transition from that warmer climates to now cooler environments, right? Now the Arctic is frozen mostly. For now.

So, yeah, they have played a big role. Their weediness have played a big role in Earth geological history.
You mentioned something about the fern that can climb trees and tree climbing ferns.

And a bunch of people, Cynthia B., Ellis Sugarman, Earl of Gray Milk, and Mads, First Time Quest Oscar, J-Mo, and Cynthia Z.

Cynthia Z, all caps, all caps, three exclamation points. Please tell me more about ant ferns.
I fell in love instantly with

Lecanopteris genus. Lecanopteris, yeah.

Currently grow a few species. How did they co-evolve with ants? Can they substitute the role of ants with fertilizer? Do they host bugs other than ants?

Mads wanted to know, do ferns have a symbiotic relationship with other animals or plants? So, you know, we're talking about some ferns live on trees as symbionts, others working with ant alliances.

What's going on? First, let's talk about ant ferns because I have no idea what Cynthia Z is talking about. Yeah, so like anopteris that they mentions have a really interesting rhizome structures.
So

usually rhizome is really like a a thing like a pencil, right? Running on the grounds or running on trees. But a rhizome of ant ferns, like anopteris, it's like a maze.
It's like a balloon

and has chambers, they have different places, and the ants will live inside the rhizomes. And so, ferns are providing a really comfy place for ants to live, and the ants' job is to protect the ferns.

So, if there's any aphids, some other insects want to eat the ferns, the ants will fight them off. So, it's kind of a symbiotic interaction.

And the cool thing about this is this evolved multiple times in ferns' evolutionary histories. There's another fern genus called Solanopteris.

So Solanopteris solenum, the rhizomes like a tomato, size like a tomato. And again, similar things.
The ants will chew into the big rhizome and they live inside the rhizomes. Again, for protections.

That's so cool. That's like a condo.
Yeah, exactly. And some ferns have nectar.
So they have either very special like nectary structures or sometimes just secrete really sugary liquids.

Again, they're enticing ants to come over and hoping they will be their bodyguard. We need you here.

And then in terms of other plants that they like to live with, do climbing ferns benefit some trees?

Are there other plants that like to grow near ferns because they do a certain thing to the soil? Or do they, do ferns have friends, I guess? Oh, yeah, they have friends.

So in the neotropics, right, in central america or south america you have bromeliads the big pineapple things on the on the trees right the pineapple things they kind of like upside down cats and they will collect a lot of liters

so those are in the neotropics in the in asian tropics you have the bird nest ferns they look kind of similar They have big leaves and overlapping leaves, so they collect a lot of leaf liters on the trees.

And because of that, some frogs like to live on those, specifically on those brownest ferns. And a lot of insects tend to live in that habitat.
Orchids also like to hang down from those Burnett ferns.

And

the azolla ferns I mentioned, the one that cooled down the earth, they have

a very specific cyanobacteria that live inside of them. So the cyanobacteria,

the phallosymphatic cyanobacteria, they can fix nitrogens meaning they can turn nitrogen gas into ammonia and only a few bacteria can do that and essentially azolla ferns have their own fertilizers so they carry their symbiotic bacteria with them but they can live in a really low nitrogen environment

and The Asian farmers have figured out how to use this. So before they plant the rice, they will flood the rice paddies and they will put azolla there.

And the azolla will grow and they will fix nitrogen through their symbiotics and the bacteria.

And then it will drain the water and the azolla will come down to the soil and it will decompose, release all the fixed nitrogens, and then they will plant the rice. Ah.

So this is a very clever way to boost their productivity. It's like its own plant fertilizer.
Thanks for that. It's like Miracle Grow or something, but for a bigger scale.
What about size?

Like Mouse Paxton, Marissa Jacobson, Rhys Perini, Ranger France, Jenna Congden, Lunar Crumpet, Sustainable Cyrenian, Amelia DeHoff, Jamie B. All these people wanted to know about giant ferns.

Amelia DeHoff said, Are giant ferns a newer development than the rest of our fern species? Or are they an OG? When it comes to size, like what's up with giant ones?

The biggest one, I think, would be the tree ferns. Oh, okay.
The silver ferns in New Zealand, those are tree ferns. They have tree fern forests, which is awesome.

And the trunk of those tree ferns, they don't have woods, so they don't produce any woods at all.

The thing you see on the trunk is actually roots.

So imagine a fern growing up, and when they're growing up, the apex will actually shoot down roots from the top.

And the roots will serve as the support structures. And that's how the tree trunk is made in tree ferns.
It's mostly just roots. Oh, wow.
The stem itself is not actually very big. Yeah.

And those roots are really strong roots. They're just not the wimpy roots you see.
They're really reinforced roots with lots of fibers in them. What about,

let's see, fractal pattern? M. Rothamel, Paulina Tar, Kaylee Bell, Claire Rishi wanted to know, Claire says fern math, Fibonacci sequence, Barnsley fern, why are these plants so mathematical?

And yeah, why do ferns, and wanted to know embody fractal patterns? What's going on there? Gosh, this is a question I don't know how to answer. There was a paper exactly about this.

It's a paper by Sandy Hetherington from Edinburgh. They have a beautiful paper about the mathematics in math and fossil ferns.

And for more on this, you can see the 2025 paper, Identification of a Tetrahedral Apical Cell Preserved Within a Fossilized Fern Fiddlehead, where doctors Raphael Cruz and Sandy Hetherington looked at a 315 million year old fern fossil and they concluded that fiddleheads have been around for a long time and that fern leaves evolved through the modification of shoots.

And the spirals in nature may have evolved simply because it's a very efficient packing method. So think about that next time you organize your sock drawer.

Also, if you're a fractophile and you can't get enough of the seemingly infinite repeating patterns of fern leaves, I would like to to direct you to the 1988 book, Fractals Everywhere, by a mathematician named Michael Barnsley, who has a fractal named after him, and it's also named after a fern.

It's the Barnsley fern fractal, and models of it look like a fern leaf. But if you're a pterodologist, you would say best resembles a black spleenwort, naturally.

Also, I know that approximately all percent of you are listening, just waiting to find out why your fern is dead. Maybe you're Dr.
Lee's wife.

So, me not being a pterodologist or even an owner of a single fern, did spend some time asking the internet why you suck at ferns. And I gathered the following tips.

So, ferns like humidity, so keep them in a bathroom with a window, but not in a bathroom without a window. They need to be somewhere with light.

They don't actually grow well in basements, but not too sunny, or you might scorch them.

So, if you have a south or a westward-facing window, set them back a few feet from it, mist them, water them when the soil is dry you might have to stick your finger in there like every day to check but water from the roots and not the crown and also if your fern is brown and brittle you probably underwatered it and if your fern just fucking sucks and it's shedding leaves and you can't keep it alive it might be a boston fern which some fern enthusiasts seem to hate because they are cheap they are abundant and they are an easy thing to kill so everyone thinks all ferns are bad houseplants, but it may just be that they got a bad Boston.

Also, we have an amazing domestic pathophytology episode with Tyler Thrasher about why your houseplants are dead and how to keep them alive. And I suggest you have a listen.
It's great.

Tyler is very passionate about your dead houseplants and judgmental, but it's good. Okay, moving onward.
This is a very, very technical, scholastic question.

I'm not sure if you're going to be able to answer it.

Coco wants to know:

I really want a fern tattoo. Does the ologist have one?

It's actually not a hard question. Wants to know if you have a fern tattoo.
I do not have a fern tattoo. If you had to get a fern tattoo, if they were like, listen,

if you want to fund your lab, you have to go get a fern tattoo right now

or your lab is going to close down. What fern would you get a tattoo of? I will get a Lady Gaga fern tattoo.
And then maybe I will show it to Lady Gaga saying, please fund my lab.

Gaga, Stephanie, fund the lab.

Okay, so no fern tattoos. Do any of your grad students or postdocs, anyone have fern tattoos? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they do. They will show off their fern tattoos.
Yeah, they will lift their shirts saying, hey, see what I got.

But, I mean, if you want to get a temporary one, there's a cool way to do it. How? So earlier I mentioned there are some ferns living in the desert, right?

And one adaptations they have is they produce a lot of foreigner. So, those are little white color or yellow-color powders on the leaf.

So,

if you find a nice fern in the desert, and you flip it over and you see this bright yellow or bright white, pick it up, and then you can put on your pants, put on your shorts, and you smash it.

And then they will leave the impressions of that foreigner on your shirts or pants. And this is beautiful, it's beautiful, and it's temporary and it's free.
It's temporary, yeah.

Just don't do it in a national park, yeah. Okay, don't do it in a national park, and maybe draw ferns.
You could always draw ferns too.

You could take a sharpie and draw a fern on you, see how you like it. Yeah, what about uh, Mads and Cass the Dog Nerd, Rowan Tree, Danny C,

Murder Birder,

so many people. Ellaraptor, sustainable Cyrenian.
I want to know if you have a favorite fern. Danny C wants to know what's the prettiest fern, in your opinion.

I know this is really putting you on the spot because there's so many ferns that are going to be like, oh, really? Interesting. But do you have a favorite fern that you just are like,

close to your heart? I cannot answer that question. It's like, who's your favorite child? Kind of questions.
No. No, they're all good.

Okay, what about smell? Again, Addie Capello, Matt Mesnick, first new question asker, Brenna Hull wanted to know, Brenna said, why do ferns have that incredible fern smell?

And Matt Mesnick's wife said, why do crushed up ferns smell so delicious?

Okay, so the first question is that

I don't know what kind of nose this person has, but I've never been able to get the fern smell.

I recently got a candle of anthropology that has a label as a fern, but then I look at the ingredient, it has no fern in it and doesn't smell like a fern. I don't know, but then

the crushed ferns, yes, so there's a species called hay-scented ferns,

and it's famous for you know, you hike across it, and then the crushed on leaves, you have the hay-scented smell, but that's very specific for that fern species.

Some ferns they are sweet, so if you want to taste it, there's a species called polypodium glycorhiza. So, glycerhiza means sugar rhizome and

it has like licorice taste to it.

In the flora of North America, if you look at the keys how to identify the species, there's a few notes about different species would taste different.

So you have to chew the rhizomes and then remember the taste and then that's how you identify the species. It's kind of like when geologists are out there licking rocks a little bit.

You know how geologists like lick rocks to be like, this one's salty.

But definitely make sure that you know what you're munching on beforehand, right?

Yeah, definitely. What about touch response? Jessica Doob, Manatee Lover, and Freddie and Eli want to know what makes certain ferns react so quickly.
How come not all of them can?

But Jessica Dube asks, what causes some of them to close up when they're touched? Okay, so they are not ferns. They are mimosa.
It's a ligam plant.

So here you go. There you go.

Mistaken identity, right?

Well, they do have that feathery, dissected leaves. So, so I guess, yeah.
Is that what is the name of that leaf structure? Is it pinnate or

pinnatophytes? Yes. Okay.
Yeah. One person wanted to know, Laurel said, how do I become ferns after I die? Especially if they're surrounded by big moss and trees.

Like if you wanted to die and then become a bunch of ferns is there a place where you should ask for your body to be deposited do you do you go and go you know what i mean i would go to new zealand new zealand yeah just die in new zealand die in new zealand yeah okay new zealand there you go so get a passport to new zealand

walk into the woods when it's your time but not before alyssa wanted to know because i know that your parents were like amazing and got you field guides alyssa deodado wants to know if you have any favorite field guides or fern books.

Has anyone just like absolutely knocked it out of the park with a fern book? This is a trick question. I've won.
Well, there you go.

You like mine.

Wow, that sounds nauseous.

Dude, it's a mess.

It's right here, if you want to see.

Yes, dude. There you go.

Get your fern book. The book is called Ferns, Lessons in Survival from Earth's Most Adaptable Plants.

And it has chapters on ferns on trees, ferns as trees, desert ferns, ferns and animals, humans and ferns, the past and the future of ferns. And it is just an elegant and gorgeously illustrated book.

It belongs on your coffee table or under a holiday tree. We'll link it in the show notes.
Top shelf fern book. Also.

But in terms of field guide, there was a new one by Emily Sessa for New York Botanical Garden, and that's a beautiful fern guide. You should get.

Does Zach Elephanakis know of your work?

No. No? No.
I think someone needs to tell him. I know his work.
I know his work. He doesn't know mine.
You need to get him a copy of your book.

Yeah.

If he doesn't have it,

I want him to sit between two copies of your fern book. And I interview Lady Gaga.
Yes, and interview Lady Gaga.

Oh my god you can be on set as a consultant i mean the federal funding is going away and we all need money to do research yeah so whatever it takes man whatever it takes whatever it takes we'll send it up the chain we're like if anyone listening to this knows zach albanakis and or lady gaga please please

for research in trouble

um well that you know the last questions i always ask are what is the hardest part of your about your job and right now federal funding is in the toilet and things are in absolute bunkers.

We got climate change.

What's the hardest part about what you do? Or what's gotten harder? Or is there something that's just annoying?

I think funding has been more and more difficult. We spend a lot of time writing proposals and sometimes we got really good feedback from NSF, USDA, DOAE, those federal agencies.

And they just don't have enough money to fund all the good research projects. And

some foreign research can really change things, right? The insecticidal things I mentioned earlier, right, has the actual practical translations into agriculture.

Some people are studying symbolises with cyanobacteria.

How, if we can engineer a symbolic of cyanobacteria with some corn plants maybe, or rice plants, that will also change how we do our agriculture. So a lot of this have real translations to real world.

And also foreign diversity is going away because all the things you mentioned, we do really need to understand their diversity before they disappear.

And those kind of research is really hard to get funding.

So Lady Gaga, if you're listening, help us out.

What about the best thing? What do you love? Like what keeps you going?

I guess the discovery and also working with people. I have a really awesome lab and it's really fun talking to them.
I think what makes science great is the people. It's great to nerd out together.

And I love that fern people are rowdy and stick together.

That's so great. There's going to be people listening to this who are like, I'm a fern person and I never knew that there were other fern people out there that I could join up with.

Or join American Fern Society. Oh my god, get your book.
This is amazing.

Thank you so much for doing this. This is just one of my favorites.
I think your book should be a holiday gift for anyone who likes plants.

Thank you. Get the book.

So ask fantastic people for reals, not smart questions, because they may have the same questions on their mind. And please grab a copy of Dr.

Lee's book, Ferns, Lessons in Survival from Earth's Most Adaptable Plants, which we will link in the show notes for you alongside more of his research.

We have a ton more links up at alleyward.com slash ologies slash pterodology. We're at ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky.
I'm at Alley Ward on both.

We have shorter, kid-friendly episodes of ologies called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, available wherever you get podcasts. They're in their own separate feed you can subscribe to.

And ologies merch is at ologiesmerch.com. And you can join our Patreon for a dollar at patreon.com slash ologies.
Aaron Talbert admins the Ollogies podcast Facebook group.

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Dwyer does the website.

Noelle Dilworth keeps us evolving through time as scheduling producer, managing director Susan Hale is the fractal path that moves us forward.

Jake Chafee edits our massive genome of audio alongside lead editor and always nature adjacent Mercedes-Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn unfurled the theme music.

And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I will tell you a secret from my sometimes ashamed brain.

This week, it's that I was away for our Olagy's live show in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago, and then I went straight to Lisbon.

I left the country for six days for a friend's wedding, and it was wonderful. And then I came back.
It was Thanksgiving. My point is, my inbox is a mess.
It's so bad.

It's just a tangled understory of branches and dead stuff and leaf litter and pythons and strangling vines. I have so many emails to return.
It's just frightening.

Honestly, Ward, you're playing with fire here. So, if I owe you an email, I swear today is the day.
Also, I have never seen the Fern Gully, which everyone wants to know about.

Everyone has questions about. It's a 1992 animated classic.

Your friend Wikipedia just told me that it was Robin Williams' first animated film ever, and that, quote, Williams provided 14 hours of improvised lines for the part, which had been originally conceived as an eight-minute roll.

14 hours of improv. I can't even imagine the vibe in the room.
14 hours, and I can't return an email. Okay, I'm off.
Bye-bye.

Pachodermatology, homiology, cryptozoology, latology, nanotechnology, meteorology, old factology, mapology, seriology, self-domination.

Who killed Fern?

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