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Plant Migration and Fern Spores

48:53 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Plants are migrating toward cooler ground, but climate change is now moving faster than they can.

  1. Plants migrate as species, not as individualsPlants are sessile organisms, but seeds and spores let a whole population creep north, south or uphill.
  2. Climate is outrunning the treesRed oaks manage a tenth to three-tenths of a mile a year; the climate moves four to six.
  3. Arriving somewhere cooler is not enoughSugar maples reaching Quebec's boreal forest hit soil pH and microbes they cannot work with, and stall.
Executive Summary AI
  • Josh reintroduces the August 2023 Stuff You Should Know episode on plant migration, the fact that plants move as species even though individual plants are sessile.1:31
  • Ferns are the extreme case: a Tasmanian tree fern sends spores 500 to 800 kilometers, 300 to 500 miles from the mother plant, and a single frond makes more than 750 million of them.3:22
  • Clement Reed's 1899 paradox of rapid plant migration came from oaks that crossed about 600 miles of the British Isles in roughly 10,000 years after the last glacial period, when ordinary seed dispersal should have taken a million years.9:55
  • The race is now lopsided: a University of Vermont group found New England red oaks moving a tenth to three-tenths of a mile a year while the climate moves four to six miles a year, and the Earth has warmed more than one degree in 200 years against one degree every 1,400 years after the last ice age.22:23
  • Humans are answering with forest assisted migration, assisted range expansion and species rescue, the last judged riskiest by ecologists, with the Monterey pine—endangered in California, a weed in Australia—as the critics' warning.40:15
Key Quote
“A fern can travel, the Tasmanian tree fern in particular, can send its spores 500 to 800 kilometers.”
— Josh3:22
Key Quote
“So different plants and trees are moving in different directions at different rates.”
— Chuck23:40
Key Quote
“It's a positive feedback loop that's super-duper negative.”
— Josh30:39