This gallery contains 6 photos.
Originally posted on Lore and Leandro in French Guiana:
15 Days ago it all started with 1 roadblock in Kourou. Strikers blocked the access road to the Space Center in an attempt to delay the planned rocket launch. It worked.…
At the Functional Ecology conference in Montpellier (see earlier posts), several times I heard the saying that plants cannot fly and as such have a significant limitation compared to other organisms.
Seeds of the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), possibly the most well-known image of flying plants
Yet I strongly disagree with that saying, no matter how true it might look at first sight. Plants do fly, some of them even for large distances, just not in all phases of their live. As in all organisms, it is important to understand the live of a plant through the different life stages it is going through: germination – growth – flowering – seed production – dispersal – new germination. Even within the same plant species, factors working in on each of these life cycle stages can be totally different from the other.
A young Euphorbia growing in a bed of poplar tufts, seeds with long white hairs attached to them to aid wind dispersal
Many plant species are highly mobile, either flying, swimming, rolling, jumping or passively travelling attached to other mobile organisms or things. They just aren’t mobile in every life stage; their mobility is limited to their live as seeds. Yet this easily overlooked phase of mobility is not trivial: it defines why plants grow where they grow, it defines if they can track climate change or not, it defines if they are capable to track fast – or slow – changes in their environment.
Little purple Veronica flower in a bed of poplar tuft
Even the duration of this phase is not necessarily neglegible. Many plants can stay mobile for a long time, until they find a spot to settle down, and especially for annual species the time spend as seed and as actual plant is not so different at all.
Berries can fly as well, albeit often only in the stomach of a hungry bird
At the conference, I even gave a presentation about travelling plants, using their skills to hike uphill in the mountains. Such unusual travel plans will stay a significant component of my work in the next months, so stay tuned to learn some more!
UPDATE 5/4/17: There is a second – highly important – life stage in which plants fly: as pollen. While they can travel impressively large distances in this shape, they of course need to find a conspecific flower at the end of their trip. Yet this gives most plants two distinct options in their lives to travel! Should I convince you more that plants are not suffering from being sessile?
A post on the Functional Ecology conference in Montpellier, organised by AnaEE France.
Opening up the view on Montpellier and its cathedral
Montpellier, the city that opened up the views on the interesting topic of functional ecology (the theme of the 3-day conference I attended here this week).
Overarching the entrance to the cathedral of Montpellier
A city that – through this conference – taught me that we need strong connections between the various pilars of ecology, and keep on searching for ways to integrate them: (1) repeating projects at different locations, yet taking into that each different location will have different factors at play; (2) searching for adequate models to cover this increasing complexity that we want to explain and (3) being aware of the need of good platforms to share data and information, that are consistent between different scientists.
Two towers are better than one, as they are never exactly the same
And a city that again convinced me that two experiments are always better than one, as every attempt to approach an ecological issue from another direction will bring you closer to the truth, yet not always directly.
This week, I took the train down to Montpellier, in the sunny Meditteranean part of France, to join a conference on Functional Ecology. Here, scientists gather around the common goal of trying to find the ‘how’ in ecology. How do organisms do what they do, how do they ‘work’ in relationship with their environment?
Next to an awesome location, we thus also have highly interesting scientific talks, that will hopefully teach me a lot more about a way of ecological thinking I have less experience with.
More pictures and stories from the Mediterranean soon!
The Japanese garden in Vilvoorde, Belgium, symbolising eastward connections
As you can see in my previous post, where you can find an insightful map of my current global scientific network, my global network has only a limited connection with the east. While strong ties exist within Europe and across the ocean to both the Americas, getting to know – and collaborate with – colleagues in Asia has till now been more of a challenge.
Japanese cherry
Yet the future of our Eastern ‘trade route’ has recently been getting brighter. We met some great Asian colleagues, passoniate about the same topics. Collaborations are now being forged. These new collaborations now already add new, fresh insights to our way of thinking, while at the same time allowing me to dive deeper into the fascinating ecosystems in the east.
Definitely worth the effort!
For a scientist to be successful, a global network is crucial. International collaborations bring in new insights, different views on science and important sources of data and knowledge. These ideas are even more relevant in the discipline of ecology, where many of the asked questions need globally relevant answers. You can just never fully grasps the interactions of living things with each other and the environment without searching for the similarities ànd differences in these interactions all over the world.
In my research, this global aspect has always been a main goal and now, after 6 published papers and 1.5 years before the end of my PhD, it is a nice moment to make up the balance. I thus made a map combining the places I have visited myself (dots) and all people that I collaborated with on these 6 papers (lines).
Lines are weighed based on the amount of papers together (bolder lines means more interactions), black lines indicate anticipated future collaborations. The red dot is home (Antwerp, Belgium), green dots stand for past visits, yellow dots for anticipated visits.
While the network starts to look like a spider, I am pretty curious to see how this will end up looking 1.5 years for now, at the end of this adventure and – if all goes as hoped for – throughout the rest of my scientific career. Also, if you’re a young (or older scientist) reading this and are triggered by the concept, feel free to share your own global network, we could learn a lot here about the ongoing globalisation of science!
The 3D lab 