A crack team of arthropod bodyguards may be defending that cherry tree in your backyard or the maple across the street.
Mites protect plants by acting like herds of grazing sheep, munching the fungi that creep across leaves. And ants patrol branches, ready to bite or sting hungry caterpillars — or even elephants. In return for the protection, plants offer food and housing.
Her office at the university looks how you might imagine it would for someone so captivated by the natural world. A fiddle-leaf fig towers over her desk and potted plants crowd the window. 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.
Weber may be best known for her work on extrafloral nectaries. 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 looked at extrafloral nectaries in modern vascular plants and then reconstructed the trait’s evolution across ancient plant species. The trait, she discovered, was a recipe for evolutionary success.
Weber didn’t see herself as a scientist when she was young. As a student growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she didn’t see examples of women scientists, and she never thought about science as a career option. A biology course with spider scientist Greta Binford at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., changed everything. “Knowing that was a job and watching her do it was just incredibly life-shaping for me,” Weber says.
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