Plants are incredibly diverse, and so are botanists! In its mission to spread fascinating stories about the plant world, Botany One also introduces you to the scientists behind these great stories.
Today, we have Dr Mario Vallejo-Marin, an evolutionary biologist interested in how plants evolve and how pollinators have shaped the evolution of flowers and vice versa. He grew up in Mexico City, a beautiful, massive, and chaotic city in the middle of the highland valley in the centre of the country. There, he studied biology at the Ecology Institute of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), which is located in a small but beautiful ecological reserve grounded on the lava fields left behind by a nearby volcano. He left Mexico to study for a PhD in the US at Duke University, thinking he would be back after a few years. Vallejo-Marin continued travelling, first to do a postdoc at the University of Toronto and then to the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he started his first permanent job. Now, 25 years after first leaving Mexico, he is based at Uppsala University (Sweden) as a Professor in Ecological Botany.
What made you become interested in plants?
I don’t think I was particularly interested in plants when I was studying biology in Mexico. Like most people, I thought animals were a bit more interesting as they move about and behave in obvious ways. I first took plants as a study system when my undergraduate supervisor, Cesar Dominguez, suggested that if I wanted to do evolutionary experiments, plants are more easily manipulated, stay put, and complain less when you chop, twist, glue, or otherwise alter them in your experiments. Since then, I have become fascinated with plants, particularly their flowers; the more I learn about them, the more enthused I am with them. Of course, when studying plants, you can never be too far from other organisms, and in the last few years, I have also been interested in understanding how bees function, behave, and evolve in response to the flowers they visit.
What motivated you to pursue your current area of research?
At the moment, I have two main areas of research, and each was motivated by different things, although both are grounded in my interest in evolutionary biology, which really started after taking a class on population genetics as an undergraduate. One area of my current research is centred around a type of pollination that some bees do, called buzz pollination. Buzz pollination occurs when bees use vibrations to shake pollen out of certain flowers. I study how it functions and why it has evolved. I first noticed buzz pollination during my PhD and postdoc, but I only began to seriously look at it when a chance encounter brought me to meet an acoustic biologist, Paul De Luca. Paul was awarded a Royal Society grant to visit a common friend, Luc Bussiere, to study acoustic communication in grasshoppers in Scotland. Scotland is not particularly rich in grasshoppers, even in the warmer months, so when they decided to look for a different project, I suggested we work together to study buzz pollination. Paul’s expertise in the sound analysis was a key factor that allowed us to study the mechanical properties of buzz-pollinating bees. That project kickstarted a long-term interest in understanding buzz pollination from the proximate mechanisms to the ultimate questions. Paul and I collaborated for many years until his untimely passing a couple of years ago. Studying buzz pollination has been lots of fun and has given me many reasons to visit fantastic places to measure bee and flower vibrations, including Australia, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, and Patagonia! My second area of research is about how new species can be formed through whole genome duplication (polyploidy) and hybridisation, and for this, I study monkeyflowers (Mimulus spp.). How I got started on this also has a lot to do with chance encounters, although in this case, I was running into a flower that looked familiar in a Scottish burn. But perhaps it is best to leave that story for another time.
What is your favourite part of your work related to plants?
Two things: Being out in the field and doing experiments. I love doing fieldwork, looking for plants and bees in remote locations, exploring new places and travelling far and wide to study and photograph nature. My fieldwork with plants has been very rewarding for many years and has allowed me to visit many wonderful places, from the remote Aleutian Islands to the breathtaking peaks of the Patagonian Andes and the tropical forests of Central and South America. Many of the places I visited would have been very hard to see had I had most other jobs. Fieldwork is a continuous source of inspiration for new and old projects. Like many others, I find that direct contact with organisms in their natural environment and observing nature up close are the best ways to stimulate new ideas and help ground the explanations and interpretations that we put forward when writing scientific papers. When not in the field, I am happiest in my lab tinkering with machines and equipment to do experiments on buzz pollination. When I do that, I feel like I am playing more than working, and reminds me of the games we used to play as kids in the 80s when we would build “computers” out of wooden toolboxes, old alarm clocks, loose cables, and lots of imagination.
Are any specific plants or species that have intrigued or inspired your research? If so, what are they and why?
Plants are inspiring and I can think of many that continue to intrigue me either because of their striking flowers, unusual pollination, or just by being odd botanical balls! But a plant species close to my heart is the Scottish monkeyflower, Mimulus peregrinus. I had the good fortune to discover and describe this species a few years ago. The Scottish monkeyflower evolved from two invasive monkeyflowers that colonised the UK about 200 years ago from South and North America. In the UK, these two plant species hybridised and over time gave rise to a new species through whole genome duplication less than 150 years ago. Thus, M. peregrinus is a newly evolved species younger than Darwin’s Origin of Species. Discovering this plant and adding another example to the few cases of recent speciation through whole genome duplication that we know about, is one of the things that has given me most pleasure in my academic life.
Could you share an experience or anecdote from your work that has marked your career and reaffirmed your fascination with plants?
When I was a postdoc in Toronto, I took a couple of weeks off to do fieldwork in western Mexico with my friend and colleague Boris Igic. Boris and I had met in an Evolution conference a few years back and discovered that we were both interested in an obscure but really cool study system that had been investigated in the 1970s by a researcher called Michael Whalen. Whalen had found a curious case of two species of Solanum that when in allopatry had similar flowers, but in the area of contact, where the two species met, the flowers of one of them shifted in size very dramatically. The case of these species in Solanum Section Androceras remains a classic but little-known potential example of reproductive character displacement. Boris and I decided to retrace the steps of Whalen and see with our own eyes whether this pattern was as clear as reported in the old literature. For several days we drove and trekked in western Sinaloa, Nayarit, and Sonora, areas that sadly have become better known for their connection with drug cartels than with botany, and where doing fieldwork becomes quite tricky. After some failed searches in the first days and close encounters with people of dubious reputation, we finally found the zone of contact and the pattern described in the old papers. Seeing the dramatic shift in flower size in the presence of its congener spurred many scientific discussions and ideas with Boris and made for an extremely rewarding and stimulating scientific expedition to a beautiful part of Mexico.
What advice would you give young scientists considering a career in plant biology?
Succeeding in plant biology like most other professions has as much to do with determination as with opportunity and luck. Opportunity and luck are often out of our hands so what remains is persisting in doing what you are interested in and passionate about. Careers in plant sciences are very diverse, and my advice would be to keep a broad mind as to what exactly your professional path can be. Read lots and widely and don’t be afraid of straying outside your comfort zone. You never know where and when your next career opportunity or academic insight will come from. And perhaps less important but also key: as far as you can, work on things that you really care about and are interested in, which might not be latest trend according to the funders. You don’t want to get stuck working on a trendy project that doesn’t trigger your imagination.
What do people usually get wrong about plants?
That they are boring!
Carlos A. Ordóñez-Parra
Carlos (he/him) is a Colombian seed ecologist currently doing his PhD at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) and working as a Science Editor at Botany One and a Communications Officer at the International Society for Seed Science. You can follow him on Bluesky at @caordonezparra.
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