These insects protect the plants from predators, a kind of ant-plant cooperation that has appeared often throughout evolution. Some plants form sugar-secreting growths (green ovals) that ants find appetizing. That suggests that the opportunity to trade nectar for insect protection actually spurred plants to diversify. Once the sweet structures evolved in a branch of the plant family tree, that branch quickly accumulated more species. The trait, she discovered, was a recipe for evolutionary success. Weber looked at extrafloral nectaries in modern vascular plants and then reconstructed the trait’s evolution across ancient plant species. These nectar-filled knuckles bulge from leaves and stems on some plants, leaking sugary snacks that entice ants to stick around and fend off attacks. Weber may be best known for her work on extrafloral nectaries. She spends her time in the field, greenhouse and the lab, documenting interactions between plants and arthropods, as well as using computational techniques to analyze evolutionary patterns. Weber’s lab focuses on how cooperation drives evolution and biodiversity. Cooperation’s role in evolution hasn’t always been taken seriously, “largely because it was viewed as a more feminine perspective,” Weber says. 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. 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. ![]() A fiddle-leaf fig towers over her desk and potted plants crowd the window. ![]() Her office at the university looks how you might imagine it would for someone so captivated by the natural world.
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