The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

Author:Zoë Schlanger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The Scientist and the Chameleon Vine

On the plane from New York to Santiago, Chile, the in-seat screen showed me a map of our route as a thick line straight down the globe. We would be in flight for eleven hours, moving directly south. I was reading about the temperate Chilean rain forest in which I was about to spend much of the next week. It was sandwiched between a series of lakes and a chain of volcanoes in a southern region of the long slender country, two hours by another plane yet farther south of Santiago. In 2014 a Peruvian ecologist named Ernesto Gianoli had discovered that a common vine in this rain forest was capable of something no other plant was known to do. It could, quite spontaneously, morph into the shape of almost any plant it grew beside.

Boquila trifoliolata is a simple-looking plant, with bright-green oval leaves in groups of three, like a clover or a common bean. I’d spent hours looking at photographs of it, and felt I knew it well, or rather knew that this oval shape was hardly the whole story. Gianoli had counted twenty different species of plants that boquila could mimic, but the list grew constantly. Whenever he flew down to do fieldwork in this region, he found another. It seemed to be just a matter of looking closely, and time.

Yet despite the fact that boquila had become a minor celebrity in certain botanical circles, Gianoli was still the only researcher who studied it in the place where it naturally grew. He was eager to get back. When Gianoli finally managed to organize a research trip to boquila territory, some eighteen months after I’d first tried to join one of his visits, he sounded relieved and excited. He and his team would be studying another vine while they were there, he said, but I was welcome to join, and there would be plenty of boquila to see.

I’d been following the discovery since I’d quit my job three years prior, and in that time boquila had begun to cause a true botanical stir. A research group in Germany felt sure this incredible mimicry implied the plant could see. How else could it accurately reproduce the texture, the vein pattern, the shape, of a neighboring leaf? Gianoli didn’t like that theory. He had a very different idea of what was going on. Something about bacteria, which he would explain to me later. But whatever the mechanism, it was obvious to me that this vine was poised to change our conception of what plants are, and what they can do. It seemed very much worth the trip. I booked a flight immediately.

Gianoli is a professor at the Universidad de La Sirena in Chile, where he specializes in adaptive plasticity, or the ability of plants to adjust their behavior to suit a changing environment. When we began our correspondence, we used voice notes to communicate so that he could respond on his own schedule (his newborn wouldn’t sleep, he explained).

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