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 Zong-Xin Ren, who is an associate professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Kunming, China. Ren got his PhD from KIB, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010, and was a visiting scientist and a postdoc at St. Louis University and Missouri Botanical Garden from 2013 to 2014. His research interest is the evolutionary ecology of plant-pollinator interactions and its implications for conservation and sustainable use. Mainly, Ren focuses on the role of evolutionary history, anthropogenic disturbance and global change in shaping plant-pollinator interactions and plant reproduction. His research includes three major lines: pollination ecology of orchids, nectar secretion and the global pollination crisis. Most of my research is on the mountains of Southwest China, a mega-biodiversity hotspot with the richest temperate flora in the northern hemisphere.
What made you become interested in plants?
I grew up in a small village in Lijiang, a remote place in the middle of mountains, and my childhood was filled with many plants and mushrooms. As a boy, I collected wild fruits and diverse mushrooms in the forest. Since then, I began to know the difference between many wild plants, and I was able to distinguish between toxic and edible mushrooms. The importance of plants and forests for the environment has been on my mind since that time. I was lucky to study biological science at the School of Biological Science at Yunnan University, which has a beautiful and plant-species-rich campus. The happiest thing during my college time was to recognize plants with botanical professors. This made me pursue a postgraduate study in KIB. My interest in plants was also encouraged by my international colleagues. I have had connections with my international colleagues since I was a PhD student. My postdoc supervisor, Prof. Peter Bernhardt, is one of my lifelong mentors, and Prof. Amots Dafni always cheers me up when I feel frustrated. For the past decades, they have always encouraged me and promoted me to pursue my research in botany, pollination, and pollinators.
What motivated you to pursue your current area of research?
I began my research with an internship in my current lab in KIB. My internship work was comparative nectary anatomy for representative species from banana family given by my master and PhD supervisor Prof. Hong Wang. I tried to find the differences in nectaries for species pollinated by bees, birds and bats. This is the first time I have encountered pollination and pollinators. I am fascinated by understanding plants and flowers from their interaction with pollinators. When I became an official graduate student in KIB, I was not very interested in doing taxonomy-related research. My supervisor Prof. Hong Wang gave a project on the pollination of a very special orchid, Cypripedium fargesii, I accepted this project immediately because I thought it was so cool to study plant-pollinator interaction. This is my research started, now I have already worked on pollination for almost 20 years.
What is your favourite part of your work related to plants?
My favourite part of research work is field observation and manipulative experiments. All the research questions begin with natural history. I am in a place with rich biodiversity, and many of the plant species have not been investigated for their pollinators; therefore, natural history is the first step to begin. I always ask the simplest question at the very beginning. Does this species require pollinators for seed production? Which animals pollinate this species? How does a flower attract its pollinators? After I answered these questions, I can begin to design experiments to test very basic biological questions. For example, what is the cost of floral production to a plant? Why do flowers wilt? Why do flowers salvage their nectar? Why are the inside and outside of flowers different colours? However, answering these questions is not easy. Therefore, we need to work with colleagues. To work with colleagues, especially international colleagues with different backgrounds and knowledge, is also a very enjoyable part of research. I always like walking with colleagues in the botanical garden and the forest to watch the flowers and their floral visitors. On so many flower walks, we did find so many interesting pollination stories, some of which I would never have known without the knowledge from my international visitors. For example, Sinzinando Albuquerque-Lima, a visiting postdoc of mine in 2024 from Brazil working on bat pollination, instructed me to watch bat pollination in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. That was my first time seeing a bat visit a flower in a few seconds at night.
Are any specific plants or species that have intrigued or inspired your research? If so, what are they and why?
I began my career with orchid pollination. No doubt, orchid is a system that inspired my research, especially deceptive orchids, which fool their pollinator with various signals but provide nothing to pollinators. Cypripedium fargesii is the most lovable species of mine, This is a special species with two big leaves on the ground, its flowers are brownish red. There are black spots on the leaves. During my PhD project I always wonder what role these black spots. Do they involve insect attraction? This drives me to spend four flower seasons in the forest to observe pollinators and conduct pollination work. I found out that this species is pollinated by a group of flies feeding on fungal spores. When I checked these black spots under the microscope, I found they contain many multicellular trichomes similar to chains of spores. Flowers also emit scents related to fungi. Therefore, my colleagues and I came to the idea that this is a new pollination system involving leaves mimicking fungi infection, attracting fungi-feeding flies to pollination. What an amazing finding. However, we cannot encounter such exciting things all the time. Now my research expands to include non-orchit orchid species in subalpine and alpine meadows with more diverse plant species. My colleagues and I study these species from the species level to the community level using the pollination network approach. And now I try to understand flowers from animals’ recognition and foraging behaviours, such as hawkmoths, bumblebees and other pollinators by studying their behavioural, visual, and olfactory systems.
Could you share an experience or anecdote from your work that has marked your career and reaffirmed your fascination with plants?
To observe something we have never seen before, ask doable questions, and then design an experiment to answer these questions is the most enjoyable thing in science. However, just like this world and our daily lives, there are many boring things and just a few exciting stories. I already mentioned the fungi mimic story of Cypripedium fargesii above. That was the hardest-to-forget time of my life. The place where I studied C. fargesii was a remote natural reserve in northeast Yunnan. During my field work, I stayed with a farmer’s family; there was no electricity or cell phone signal. I spent all my time checking, marking, and observing every individual of my flowers by climbing in the dense forest. I felt so frustrated by the lack of finding many pollinators due to the low visitation rate for deceptive orchids. However, now I feel I was so lucky to have such an experience, and I never ever have time to do such detailed field work anymore when I had so much writing and administrative work to do in the institute.
The second unforgettable experience was the field work of 2019. I was so lucky to have so many top scientists, including Professors Graham Pyke and Klaus Lunau, with me for two months on Yulong Snow Mountain. I brought Graham and Klaus together, who had read each other’s papers before but had never met each other, and they had such different focuses on their own research. We called our field team the China pollination team and built several sub-groups working on different projects on floral nectar, floral color, flower traits and plant-pollinator networks. I was on the floral nectar team with Graham Pyke, an internship student from Yunnan University. We discussed research topics, designed experiments, conducted work, analyzed data, and wrote the manuscript together. That is the most inspiring and productive field work in my career. The China pollination team is still working together on manuscript writing, and there are many things waiting for us to write and publish. These self-endeavors and teamwork reaffirmed my fascination with plants and their pollinators.
What advice would you give young scientists considering a career in plant biology?
To be a scientist is not easy; the most important thing is that you should love what you are doing. Always keep your eyes on what you like, to observe and to think is the best way for development. From my own experience, another key message to young scientists is to communicate with top scientists in your field as early as possible and as often as possible. How do you communicate with colleagues in your field? To let a busy scientist remember your name is not easy. However, they will not forget you if you have something interesting to share and to communicate with them. Remember, everyone is happy to see a beautiful picture of a flower and pollinator. They remember you and put you in their network because of your ideas. Share your thinking with them, and tell them what you find and observe. They will be very happy to share their knowledge and promote you to be a scientist. Contribute your data to international collaboration is another way to join the community. My final word to young scientists is that AI cannot replace us humans in field observation and experimentation, and natural history will be more important in the AI world.
What do people usually get wrong about plants?
There is a Chinese old saying, “种瓜得瓜, 种豆得豆”, it means reap what one sows, sow cucumber seed you harvest cucumber, and sow bean you harvest bean. However, without contribution of pollinators, we cannot get the fruits we sow, because many plants are depending on animal pollinators for reproduction. Global change causes pollinator decline, we will have many bad situations that we harvest nothing from what we plant.
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.
The post Zong-Xin Ren: “All Research Begins with Natural History” appeared first on Botany One.
