To protect from deadly drought and make it on land, plants developed complicated inner plumbing.
Towering redwoods and lanky jungle vines hoist water from the soil to their lofty leaves through a tubelike tissue called the xylem. In early plants, which reached just a few centimeters and lived only in wet environments, the xylem worked like a simple cylindrical bundle of drinking straws running up the stem; our modern biosphere exists because that infrastructure somehow got much more sophisticated.
Many modern xylems have intricate cross sections that look like gappy rings, crosses, diamonds or hearts, with dead space called pith separating bundles of xylem tissue. But what nudged plants to remodel their pipes this way is a century-old mystery. Bouda and his colleagues proposed recently in Science that plants developed complex xylems to withstand drought.
But smaller-scale tweaks to xylem cells and tissue organization can protect against drought, too, says Cornell University evolutionary biologist Jacob Suissa, who was not involved in the new study. Complex cross sections might have simply arisen incidentally as plants got bigger. “On an evolutionary timescale, size is correlated with increasing complexity,” he says, adding that it’s important to “question the line of thinking that every trait has to be adaptative.
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