A crack team of arthropod bodyguards may be defending that cherry tree in your backyard or the maple across the street.
Mites protect plants by acting like herds of grazing sheep, munching the fungi that creep across leaves. And ants patrol branches, ready to bite or sting hungry caterpillars — or even elephants. In return for the protection, plants offer food and housing.
This kind of cooperation has evolved over and over again, says Marjorie Weber, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Plant bodyguards are everywhere, she says, but most people don’t even notice.
Weber says she has long been drawn to “bizarre and interesting and underappreciated species.” As a kid, she liked roly-polys, earthworms, beetles and spiders. But more than individual bugs, Weber is fascinated by the richness of life on Earth. How did this vast assortment of species come to be? Start talking biodiversity, and Weber bubbles with questions: Why do we have so many different types of flowers? Why are there millions of insect species and relatively few species of sharks? Why did one branch of the tree of life flourish while another withered? “I’m just really passionate about these big biological mysteries,” she says.
Her office at the university looks how you might imagine it would for someone so captivated by the natural world. A fiddle-leaf fig towers over her desk and potted plants crowd the window. Science art adorns the walls: a hanging print of flowering plants’ evolutionary history, a blown-up image of a glimmering orchid bee and an illustration of Charles Darwin, his famous finches peeking out from his beard.
Since Darwin’s time, scientists studying what drives evolution have focused largely on antagonistic interactions between species, like finches competing for seeds and arms races between predators and prey. Cooperation’s role in evolution hasn’t always been taken seriously, “largely because it was…
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