Chapter 8: The Scientist and the Chameleon Vine

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Okay, let's unpack this.

We are diving deep today into one of the most stunning biological mysteries of the natural world.

It's a discovery so profound, it challenges our entire conception of what a plant is and perhaps, you know, what life itself is capable of.

Indeed.

We are moving beyond the basic idea of plant intelligence and responsiveness and pushing into really radical territory.

We're essentially asking a binary question.

Can plants actively see their environment and instantly change their entire identity and response?

Or are they being driven by an unseen, mutable microbial community, meaning the plant itself is merely a temporary vessel for other life?

And the stage for this incredible deep dive is the temperate Chilean rainforest, a rare, pristine environment.

The star of the show is this remarkable, humble vine, Oquila trefolio lata.

Right.

We've spent time with a chapter focused on the ecologist who first discovered its strange capabilities, Dr.

Ernesto Ginoli.

And our mission today is really to unpack the two computing radically different hypotheses vying to explain this vine's ability to spontaneously mimic its neighbors.

And when we use that word spontaneous, we are talking about next level adaptive plasticity.

This vine can literally copy over 20 different species, changing its leaf shape, texture, and color in real time.

It's faster than we can film it, certainly faster than evolution can account for.

And that's the central conflict here.

Yeah.

This is why it has kind of convulsed the world of botany.

It pits the idea of specialized plant vision, suggesting these organisms might possess a form of simple distributed eyes against the theory of

where the vine is viewed as a hollow biot, right?

A composite organism.

Exactly.

Constantly reshaped by the microbial cloud surrounding it.

Both theories, if proven,

absolutely redefine the boundaries of what an individual organism even is.

So whichever side wins this debate, the discovery of Boquila is poised to crack a general code of plants.

It could fundamentally change our conception of what they can do.

So grab your magnifying glass and let's head south to Chile.

We should begin with the man who found the chameleon Dr.

Ernesto Ginoli.

He's a Peruvian ecologist specializing in adaptive plasticity.

And before we get to the discovery itself, we really need to understand what adaptive plasticity is and why it became his focus.

Right.

Adaptive plasticity is essentially a plant's ability to adjust its behavior or physical traits to suit a changing environment.

Think of it as flexibility, the ability to choose from a wide range of available identities.

The plant doesn't have a fixed blueprint.

It's constantly optimizing.

And Ginoli, who teaches at the Universidad de la Serena in Chile, is just utterly fascinated by this.

His personal background kind of speaks to that drive, doesn't it?

Like a great origin story.

He almost went professional in soccer at age 17.

Yeah, but he chose biology instead.

And that's a huge life decision, right?

Giving up a potential sports career for the infinitely complicated world of a leaf.

It really speaks to a deep intellectual curiosity.

It does.

He chose biology because he was inspired by Darwin and felt a profound need to contribute to understanding the natural world.

He's a very methodical thinker.

And it's all summarized by this quote he uses in his email signature from the philosopher Karl Popper.

What is it?

For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew, but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance.

That acceptance of a fundamental infinite ignorance is actually the perfect mindset for tackling a phenomenon like Boquilla.

It defies every known path of botanical knowledge.

Absolutely.

If you approach nature believing you already know the rules, you will miss the exceptions.

And his early research quickly showed him that plants were not just passive agents waiting for rain or sunlight.

They were actively engaged.

So give us some of those early astonishing examples that led him to believe plants were doing much more than was supposed to happen.

Well, he started studying insect plant interactions, which is a classic ecological field.

He found plants weren't just sitting there being eaten.

They could send out plumes of chemical signals, basically SOS calls, to summon the natural enemies of the insects chewing on them, an active recruitment strategy.

And even more amazing, they can detect insect eggs on their bodies and sabotage them.

Yes, actively sabotage them, sometimes by causing the tissue beneath the eggs to just wither and fall off,

killing the unborn larvae.

And the example that I think has gained the most widespread attention is the idea that plants can perceive sound.

Right.

The recent findings that plants can detect the specific vibrations, the specific sound of caterpillars chewing.

And upon hearing that chewing, they instantly change their defense profile, increasing the concentration of bitter compounds in their leaves.

This happens before any measurable physical damage occurs.

That is just, it's mind bending.

It is.

Gina Lee says that even seasoned botanists find these developments worthy of gawkish wonder, which really reinforced his fascination with the plant side of the equation.

And that led to his specialization in vines, which makes sense because vines have this long history of showing this kind of creaturely ingenuity.

They do.

Vines are forthrightly reminiscent of animals because of their climbing behavior, which often involves, you know, great alacrity, a quickness of motion.

And this deep fascination with climbing plants is of course where Charles Darwin spent a significant amount of time.

Darwin, Gina Lee's inspiration.

He was utterly absorbed by them, writing a whole book on it in 1865 on the movements and habits of climbing plants.

What did he observe that made these plants seem so, so animal -like?

His meticulous observation detailed dozens of species and their different techniques.

Some coiled, some secreted sticky adhesive, others grew tiny hooks, but he found their movement utterly compelling.

The growing tips of the vines was slowly revolved in the air, what scientists call circummutation, until they bumped into something solid.

That searching, seeking behavior.

Yes.

That conscious movement toward a goal struck him as purposeful.

He didn't just document the biology.

He injected personality into them.

Right.

He famously watched them struggling and succeeding.

One of the best anecdotes is about the serapigae vine.

Darwin watched a growing shoot try to climb a stick, but it couldn't quite get past the top.

It would slide up, fail, and then suddenly bounded off the stick, fall a little, and then start its ascent again at the very same angle.

And this happened over and over.

It repeated several times.

And Darwin, you know, anthropomorphizing the vine, described the shoot moving as if it were disgusted with its failure, but was resolved to try again.

That's such a human reaction.

It captures the determination of life, even in the plant world.

And he also detailed the mechanics of their grip.

He described a Mexican flowering vine that grew these stiff, hooked branches.

When the revolving tendrils struck a stick, the branches would quickly bend around and clasp it.

And he emphasized that the hooks were essential, because they prevented the branch from being dragged away by the rapid revolving movement before they have had time to clasp the stick securely.

The action of holding something firmly in place to keep it from escaping.

That's what feels so unmistakably creaturely.

So, okay, vines have this long story track record of incredible feats and seeming intelligence that Darwin himself noted.

But even with all that context, Ginoli concluded that Bakila's feat of spontaneous, varied mimicry was something completely new, totally unprecedented.

And that's the essential context you have to absorb.

Vines had shown movement, intention, seeking behavior, communication.

But no previous theory in botany could explain the level of spontaneous, varied, and immediate mimicry that Bakila achieved.

This is not slow adaptation.

This is happening right now.

Exactly.

Ginoli understood immediately that figuring this out would require departing from known paths of knowledge.

He knew this was a discovery poised to yield a new concept, a new process, a new interaction, a new something.

A new something,

indeed, which sets the stage perfectly for the first truly radical proposal, the idea of plant vision.

The mystery Bakila poses, how it can spontaneously morph its leaves to look like 20 plus species,

forces us to consider this radical hypothesis of vision.

To successfully mimic something, the plant must, on some level, know what it looks like.

And for us, that means light sensing or vision.

Before we get into vision proper, we need to address the basic context of light for a plant.

Light is essential.

It's the fuel for photosynthesis, but it's also inherently dangerous.

Too much light can scorch and destroy leaf tissue.

But here is where the radical rethinking begins.

Light is also profoundly the enemy of roots.

Explain that, because we always think of roots as thriving underground in darkness.

Does light actively stress them?

It does, according to a Salokian botanist named Franchi Sheikh Baluka.

He's a founding member of the Society for Plant Neurobiology.

And his work is, well, it's provocative, to say the least.

He observed a pervasive flaw in labs.

For decades, botanists have grown plants in clear petri dishes so they can watch the roots develop.

Right, makes sense.

But they found roots grow ten times longer in these lab dishes than they do in the darkness of natural soil.

And the traditional explanation was that lab conditions are just perfect for growth.

Great nutrients, perfect moisture.

That's the traditional explanation.

But Baluka posits a radical alternate theory, one that would force us to throw out decades of literature.

He suggests the roots are actually just desperately running away from the light.

Wow.

They're sensing the light, and since it's a fundamental stress factor, they're growing as fast as possible to escape it and find darkness.

The incredible growth isn't a sign of happiness.

It's a sign of frantic, directed escape.

So we've been unintentionally observing a stress response and labeling it as optimum growth.

That would mean decades of data on root systems might be entirely skewed because scientists were inadvertently, you know, torturing the roots.

Precisely.

And this is why Baluka advocates for using darkened petri dishes in future research.

But more importantly, he pushes the language beyond mere light sensing to the idea of root vision.

He suggests we start using the terminology of sight.

Because the root isn't just reacting chemically.

Right.

It's performing a directed, purposeful escape based on perception.

And Balusha is not shy about pushing these boundaries.

He's known for his controversial work suggesting a deeper form of plant awareness.

Let's talk about his work on consciousness and anesthetics.

This is truly where the science gets philosophical and arguably a bit unsettling.

Baluka performed experiments demonstrating that plants, including vines, could be anesthetized, using things like ether or lidocaine, just like a human or an animal.

The plant just stops responding to stimuli.

It becomes out.

And he argues that if a plant can be knocked unconscious, it implies a baseline consciousness that is being interrupted.

What's his definition of consciousness here?

It's a very basic biological one.

Consciousness is simply the ability to handle situations and take care of oneself.

If a plant can perceive and respond to its environment, to light, to gravity, to insects,

it is conscious in a functional sense.

If you're anesthetized, you can't act.

You're out.

That difference for him matters immensely.

I can hear the immediate skepticism.

Consciousness is the great unsolved mystery of human and animal life.

Isn't it a huge leap to apply it to plants?

It is a massive leap, but Baluka counters with a really powerful philosophical point.

He says consciousness is hard to prove even in humans.

We can only guess if our friend is conscious.

But, he argues, anesthetics are the only semi -proof.

If something reacts to anesthetics by losing its awareness and ability to act intentionally, that suggests a form of consciousness was present.

And its interruption is meaningful.

That's a strong anchor for his ideas.

Okay, let's tie this ability to adapt and change with a historical parallel that sets the stage for Bokila.

Vavilovian mimicry.

Who is Vavilov, and why is his discovery relevant?

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a pioneering Soviet agronomist in the early 1900s.

He discovered a specific evolutionary phenomenon where weeds in crop fields began to look exactly like the crop they were growing among.

The classic example is rye.

Originally, rye was this scraggly, inedible weed.

But early wheat farmers, weeding their fields by hand, were constantly pulling out anything that didn't look like their valuable wheat.

So only the rye plants that looked convincingly like wheat survived the weeding process.

It's a perfect example of human selective pressure molding a plant's identity over time.

Exactly.

Only the best impressionists survived.

And over evolutionary time, thousands of years, this pressure molded the rye to trick the farmer's eye.

Eventually, the rye mimic became so successful and so hardy that it became a viable crop itself.

That is, Vavilovian mimicry.

Oats are another example of this slow motion process.

And the key is that this mimicry goes beyond just visual camouflage, right?

It can be incredibly precise.

Absolutely.

Think about the common vetch, a weed in lentil fields.

Its original seeds were spherical.

But to survive the mechanical process of harvesting and winnowing, the vetch seeds evolved into flat, round discs, precisely matching the shape and size of lentils.

It wasn't about tricking the eye, but about evading the sorting machines.

And the modern version of this is what we see with herbicide resistance.

That is, Vavilovian mimicry at the biochemical level.

Weeds are evolving to mimic the crop tolerance to specific chemical herbicides.

Now, Balouka takes this concept of plant manipulation a radical step further.

He argues this isn't true domestication, but a more complex coevolution.

We think we're domesticating plants.

But they are manipulating and changing us too.

Yes.

The idea that plants are constantly using complex chemicals to manipulate human behavior, making us prefer foods that influence our brains.

He suggests we may be an army of plant symbionts, diligently serving their needs.

Look at the industrial scale of human agriculture.

It certainly looks like plant service, doesn't it?

The oats may have domesticated us.

It's a provocative idea that the plant world is the primary organism, and we are secondary, fully dependent on them.

That sets the perfect intellectual stage for the next leap in the vision hypothesis.

Balouka and Mancuso's formal proposal for simple eyes in plants, which they call ocelli.

The central question with Bokele is, if a plant can do this rapid mimicry, maybe it possesses ocelli simple eyes to gather the visual information.

Balouka and Mancuso noted that an ancient ancestor of plants, cyanobacteria, had and still has the smallest, oldest example of a camera -like eye.

These cells act as spherical microlenses, helping the cell move toward light.

The hypothesis is that plants may never have dropped this fundamentally useful feature.

And they cite structural evidence for this on the leaves themselves, which is incredible.

Why would a plant sacrifice photosynthesis for sight?

Exactly.

They observe that the cells closest to the surface of plant leaves, the epidermal cells, often lack chloroplasts, the green cells needed for photosynthesis.

Logically, this is the prime location for light capture, so why would those cells be colorless?

They write, this phenomenon is not easy to rationalize.

Balouka and Mancuso suggest these specialized cells could be functioning as ocelli.

And what's truly fascinating is that this isn't a new idea.

It was proposed and then just forgotten for a century.

Right.

Gottlieb Haberlant, an Austrian botanist, proposed this same dome -like simple eye hypothesis in 1905.

He argued these cells acted as lenses, focusing light.

The concept never entered mainstream botany at the time.

Balouka and Mancuso are resurrecting it, arguing that just because scientists haven't found ocelli yet doesn't mean they aren't there.

No one's properly looked.

Right.

And regardless of whether they have a physical eye, we know plants engage in what we could call functional vision, the perception of light and shadow, especially subtle light ratios.

Vision is fundamentally about reflected light.

Green leaves absorb red and blue light, reflecting green back to us.

But when light passes through a dense canopy, the quality of that light changes drastically.

The red light gets absorbed by the leaves above.

This changes the ratio of red light to far -red light, a spectrum just on the edge of our vision.

And that change in ratio is a massive signal for plants, telling them, I am under a competitor's shade.

Precisely.

And in 2020, researchers showed that parasitic plants can read this exact information to guide their search for a host.

They studied the parasitic daughterbine, which is fascinating because it doesn't photosynthesize at all.

It has a very limited window to find a host or it dies.

Correct.

Researchers found that daughter seedlings read these changing light ratios to detect the size, shape, and distance of neighboring plants.

When given a choice between light arranged to look like a suitable branched plant and light resembling grass, the daughter chose the branched one every time.

It uses light quality to assess host quality.

And the level of precision is incredible.

It could distinguish between two plants and chose the newer one, even if the distance difference was only four centimeters.

It's judging depth of field.

You could say the daughter can, in this basic critical way, see the size and shape of its host and make strategic decisions based on that visual information.

Other photoreceptors are involved in kin recognition.

Studies on Arabidopsis showed the plant could sense genetic relatedness based on light quality passing through its neighbors and then adjust its growth to avoid shading family members.

So by the mid -2010s, evidence showed plants were sensing subtle differences in the visual field.

They could perceive shape and distance.

But the mechanism for integrating this information into an overall image and then transforming its body to match was a total mystery.

Until Boquilla.

Okay, let's get to the moment of discovery.

Dr.

Giannulli was on a research trip in the Chilean temperate rainforest near Puyuhu National Park, and he made the initial discovery in 2014.

Right, he was observing a patch of native growth and noticed a leafy shrub that appeared to have two main stems, but one was clearly much thinner.

On closer inspection, the thinner stem belonged to Boquilla trifoliolata, but its leaves were shaped exactly like the host shrub's leaves.

He had seen this vine countless times before, but never noticed this.

Once his eye was calibrated, he found it again on another tree.

That's when the gravity of the situation hit him.

He described the moment as overwhelmingly emotional, a kind of an emotion, realizing he had made a major discovery.

But critically, he understood the nature of it immediately.

This was a within generation response,

adaptive plasticity in real time, not the slow generational change of Vavilovian mimicry.

This was instant shapeshifting.

He immediately recruited his undergraduate student, Fernando Carrascaura, and they published their findings.

A single vine could imitate up to four different tree's leaves simultaneously.

And it was matching the shape, the color, the texture, even the vein pattern.

The purpose seemed to be purely defensive.

The mimicry significantly reduces herbivory.

By blending in with the more abundant host leaves, the Boquilla leaf is less likely to be detected and eaten.

It's camouflage.

The only real comparison in the plant world is mistletoe, which can also morph to look identical to its host.

We need to pause and clarify why Boquilla is so much more radical.

That is the crucial distinction.

Mistletoe's mimicry is impressive, but it's a specific evolutionary relationship.

The mistletoe sinks its roots deep into the host's circulatory system, gaining access to genetic information.

And one species of mistletoe generally mimics only one species of host.

This evolved over evolutionary time.

Millions of years.

But Boquilla is doing something completely different.

It's mimicking multiple species simultaneously.

And most importantly, it doesn't require physical circulatory contact with the host plant to pull off the trick.

It's sensing the plants in real time and transforming its leaves spontaneously.

Mistletoe took millennia.

Boquilla does it in a growing season.

The sheer plasticity is staggering.

And the context of the field site itself is important.

This rare, low -disturbance environment.

Absolutely.

The rainforest near Puejo National Park is free of many invasive species, which makes the study ecosystem unique and precious.

The sources describe Gioni's team, who had this great camaraderie even calling themselves the Caravana de Fricaso, or the Disaster Caravan.

Right, because fieldwork is always challenging.

The constant rain, the dense underbrush.

But that environment yielded native life they consumed while working.

Chilean hazelnuts, native Quila bamboo shoots.

They describe the smells of the forest.

The tepa, which was musky and clean.

And Guma apiculata, which smelled like Meyer lemons and fresh soap.

Those sensory details reinforced the unique nature of this ecosystem, where you can see this native phenomenon without, you know, a ton of other variables.

And while they were there, the team was primarily focused on studying hydrangea serratifolia, a prolific vine.

They were trying to prove its juveniles were intentionally seeking out suitable large trees to climb.

What was the hypothesis for the hydrangea?

That the vine sensed the shade cast by a large tree to judge its size, knowing a smaller tree wouldn't support it for hundreds of years.

The vine needs to make its torpedic decision before it commits to climbing.

The preliminary data was pointing to many more hits than misses, suggesting intentional perception.

And during this fieldwork, the team observed Boquilla's incredible plasticity in staggering detail.

The vine was everywhere.

But the mimicry was often paschy.

Sometimes it was just its standard self.

Sometimes the replicas were close, but not perfect, like an amateur sculptor effect.

Ginola surmised that the environment clearly plays a role.

A plant with more resources can afford this extravagant trick.

Give us some specific visceral examples of the extreme transformations.

In one spot, the Boquilla was matching neutral leaves.

These were huge, dark, glossy, finger -like, nearly the length of a hand.

Less than five feet away, the Boquilla leaves were petite, round, matte, and a cool mint green, mimicking a completely different neighbour.

The size difference alone was 15 or 16 times.

And he thought both forms could be growing from the very same plant.

He wouldn't be surprised.

They also saw the vine mimicking subtle details, like discoloration.

Where a host plant was yellowing, the mimicking Boquilla yellowed too, probably to suggest to herbivores that the leaf was poor quality.

But the most compelling evidence, which became Ginola's critical counter -evidence against the Simple Vision Hypothesis, involved a bush called Rhabiothinus spinosus.

This is where we went into the thorn problem.

What did the Boquilla do here, and why does it break the Simple Vision model?

When mimicking Rhabithamnus, the Boquilla perfectly matched the leaf's size, colour, and shape.

But it also grew a sharp, curled under -spike, a tiny, hard rhinotusk, at the very tip of the leaf.

This spike is essential to the Rhabithamnus species' defence strategy.

For Boquilla to suddenly grow, this is unprecedented.

But the reason this is so critical against the Vision Hypothesis is the geometry of the situation.

Why is this spike invisible to a vine looking down?

Because the spike is designed to curl underneath the leaf.

Ginola argues that if the vine is growing above the host, looking down with this hypothetical ocelli, it would be impossible to see the spike.

It's copying an unseen object.

The vine is looking down on the host, but the critical spike it is copying is curled underneath, facing away from its line of sight.

If Vision is the mechanism, it's not simple 2D perception.

It implies the vine is somehow processing a three -dimensional model of the leaf.

It creates a serious point of friction.

It suggests a level of intelligence, memory, and information integration that goes far beyond anything previously imagined in plants.

The implications are vast.

Boquilla is essentially accessing the genius of evolution in other plants, treating the forest as a living, patent library.

This blurring of species boundaries is so profound.

An organism that can just slipslide across the species boundary poses a serious problem for our idea of a fixed identity.

Taxonomy starts to look less like a discovery of boundaries, and more like an invention of convenient categories.

Exactly.

The plasticity is so intrinsic that even on Ginola's first Boquilla hunt with a reporter, someone spotted a new case.

A Boquilla mimicking a maidenhair fern.

Ginola admitted he had never seen that before.

The discovery is ongoing.

The plant is constantly surprising.

Okay, now we move to Ginola's preferred explanation, which is a strong rebuttal to the Vision theory and focuses on the underlying machinery of life, the microbial hypothesis.

Ginola protested Bellusa's assertion of simple plant vision.

He provided key counter -evidence.

The vine always mimicked the leaves closest to its own body, regardless of the host tree.

So if an overhanging branch of a completely different species was nearer, the Boquilla copied those leaves.

It suggests a very localized contagion -like effect, not a broad visual survey.

And Bellusa and Mancuso countered that vision was a more parsimonious explanation for the speed of it all.

I know they even set up a crucial experiment to test this.

Yes.

They enlisted a plant enthusiast who was growing Boquilla on a plastic artificial tree to rule out gene transfer or chemical communication entirely.

If the Boquilla mimics the plastic tree, that rules out microbes.

But if it doesn't, Ginola's theory gains significant weight.

So Ginola's most likely explanation involves microorganisms, most likely bacteria, acting as a form of contagion.

His theory is that these microbes are jumping from the host plant to the Boquilla, hijacking and redirecting the genes that control leaf shape.

And this is a huge scientific claim.

Leaf shape, color, size, texture.

These are products of deeply inscribed developmental programs.

The mechanism has to be capable of altering gene expression at a fundamental level, turning off the vines inherent instructions, and turning on the neighbors.

This leads us to these crucial tiny elements of life,

small RNA or microRNA.

We need to elaborate here because this is the proposed mechanism.

What exactly is microRNA?

So RNA is usually the messenger that carries instructions from the DNA blueprint to build

small RNAs or microRNAs are different.

They are non -coding short pieces of genetic material that often originate in microbes, bacteria, and viruses.

Instead of providing instructions, they act as regulators.

Think of them less as a building blueprint and more like a tiny specialized wrench.

Exactly.

They regulate gene expression.

They can latch onto a piece of messenger RNA and either destroy it or block the cell from translating the message.

In humans, we now know these microRNAs regulate as much as one -third of our entire genome.

They are the master tuners of our operating system.

And in plants, we know they're exchanged between parasitic plants and hosts, and they're perfectly capable of interfering with gene expression in nearby plants.

So Ginoli's model suggests that the appearance of all plants might be influenced, if not controlled, by microbes.

Boquila is just unique because it's so highly receptive to the microbial cloud of other species.

It picks up on the same microbial genetic interference that directs the host's leaf shape.

To make this concept of a composite organism more relatable, Ginoli uses the analogy of the termite.

Right.

A termite's signature behavior -eating wood is only possible because of the microbes in its gut which digest the cellulose.

Those microbes, in turn, host even smaller microbes.

The termite itself cannot survive or function without its microbial community.

A termite is a composite organism.

It is never just a termite.

And the same applies to us.

Our vast microbiomes govern everything from digestion and allergies, to possibly our psychology, our moods, our anxiety.

Our individuality looks much more like a contained democracy than an autonomous dictatorship.

And these microbial communities aren't fixed within us.

They extend outward into the environment as a microbial cloud.

A data scientist named James Meadow showed humans shed about a million biological particles, microbes, and skin flakes per hour, creating a literal cloud around us.

Like pig pen from peanuts, but instead of dirt, it's a living halo of bacteria.

It is.

Air acts like water to microbes.

Tiny bacteria can stay afloat for hours.

And our own body, heat, and breath constantly propel this cloud outward.

This creates a profound philosophical shift about identity.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness.

Our microbial identity fluctuates constantly.

The concept of the self is not a fixed boundary.

It is mutable and shifting.

This fluid, porous identity provides the perfect context for Giannulli's key piece of evidence regarding the bokehla, the ultimate proof of localized microbial action.

His team performed sequencing tests and found that the bacterial community of mimicking bokehla leaves, those closest to the host,

closely resembled the host's bacterial community.

And the non -mimicking leaves, separated by barely 30 centimeters on the very same vine, had a totally different bacterial community.

That is powerful evidence for a localized contagion effect.

The bokehla is literally picking up the neighbor's microbial clothing and adopting their identity.

It's very compelling.

It strongly suggests microbes are involved.

The major obstacle, though, is proving this in a controlled environment.

Giannulli has struggled to grow bokehla in a lab.

He's now working with tissue cultures, but he is certainly irritated by the bluster from the European vision scientists.

You must do the experiments first, he argues.

And this microbial hypothesis leads us to the broader holobiont concept, popularized by the pioneering evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis.

Margulis defined the holobiont as a composite organism.

The microbiome, the plant or animal itself, plus the microbiome, working in concert.

Her work was revolutionary.

She hypothesized that symbiosis, like the fusion of microbes that gave us mitochondria and chloroplasts, were far more important to evolution than slow random mutation.

Her theory was so radical, it was initially rejected by 15 different scientific journals.

But later genetic analysis proved that mitochondria and chloroplasts contain separate, distinct DNA from the host cell, confirming her idea.

We are all holobionts at the cellular level.

So if the bokela is a holobiont, its form is the result of bacterial direction.

Margulis gives us a great analogy.

She says we larger creatures are like solids frozen in a specific genetic mold.

We only exchange genes through reproduction, but bacteria swap genes in real time regardless of species, like liquid or gas.

So the plant world has a form of genetic peer -to -peer file sharing that we can only dream of.

Essentially.

If humans could do this, we could theoretically grow wings by picking up genes from a bat.

Bokela's microbial identity might just be shifting to match the genetic cues from its neighbors' bacterial communities.

And Ginoli mentioned a potential second case in the same plant family, which would suggest this chameleon ability might not be unique to bokela.

Yes, the extremely rare vine Lardy's Zabala.

Local lore in rural Chile suggests that when this vine climbs different trees, the fruit it bears inherits the medicinal properties of the host tree.

Digestive properties, heart properties, a totally different type of mimicry, functional and chemical, but it's just this entire family of vines might be particularly open to acquiring the identity of its neighbor.

As we synthesize these ideas, we have to return to the most startling aspect of the whole phenomenon.

The speed and spontaneity of the mimicry.

This is the crucial evidence that makes both the vision and microbial hypotheses necessary because long -term, slow coevolution is just.

It's ruled out.

The examples are so compelling.

Ginoli observed bokela attempting to mimic ranunculus repens, a common weed introduced to the area less than a decade ago.

The vine arranged its leaves in the same silhouette and tried to copy the ranunculus's lacy pattern, but it just produced these lumpy dimples instead.

An improvised, not rehearsed, attempt to copy a complete stranger.

No evolutionary relationship could have formed in that short a time.

And even more spontaneously, a bokela grown in a house in London, thousands of miles from Chile,

successfully mimicked a New Zealand ground cover called Creeping Wire Vine,

a plant totally foreign to Chile.

This confirms the phenomenon is intrinsic to the species and happens in real time.

So the ongoing debate really reflects the inherent appeal of both radical theories.

The vision camp appeals to those interested in plant intelligence and quick, distant perception.

But Luca's argument that vision is the most parsimonious explanation for fast, distant responses has a certain elegance.

If we accept the idea of Ocelli, the rapid transformation is easier to explain than a genetic transfer.

His team is now attempting to grow bokela with a plastic plant to deliver that definitive test.

And the microbial camp, conversely, appeals to those interested in deep interconnectedness and the composite nature of life.

Right, Ginoli's theory fits perfectly into the broader scientific discovery that microbial influence governs almost everything.

And the evidence that two parts of the same vine separated by 30 centimeters have different bacterial communities matching their hosts is highly suggestive of a liquid shifting identity guided by contagion.

Ultimately, Ginoli argues the stakes are universal.

We are not just learning about a strange vine.

He believes that whichever way the answer falls, it requires a new conception of plants.

He said, to crack the code of bokela immediately will lead us to crack a general code of plants.

Understanding this single vine will imply understanding the functional nature of plants generally and perhaps all multicellular life.

So, as a final synthesis for you, the listener, we have these two competing fundamental shifts.

On one side, plant vision, championed by Beluca, which appeals to the idea of sophisticated distributed plant intelligence and the ability to perceive the visual world and act on it.

And on the other, the microbial organization of Ginoli, which appeals to the idea of deep symbiotic interconnectedness.

Plants are holobionts, inseparable from the microcosmos, whose fixed identity is a myth, constantly negotiated via bacterial cues.

And both theories imply that the idea of a completely self -contained individual, a fixed organism with defined genetic borders, is a myth that needs to be replaced.

Indeed.

We are left with the provocative takeaway that where a plant starts and stops is not clearly understood, and maybe it's not even a useful question.

The organism is fundamentally a collection of life forms and collaborative action.

We, like the plants, are a sort of loose committee.

That is a stunning realization, brought to us by a tiny vine from the Chilean rainforest.

We came here to understand a peculiar instance of botanical camouflage, and we're leaving questioning the very boundaries of the self.

It really encourages you to consider your own microbial cloud.

If your identity is constantly fluctuating, if your behavior is influenced by the bacterial life within and around you, what invisible forces might be governing your own decisions, and how you interact with the world.

A truly mind -bending deep dive into the nature of biological identity.

Thank you for joining us.

Always a pleasure.