The survival of the grass known as Distichlis spicata mostly depends on whether it is female or male.
Ecology professor Sarah Eppley has been studying this unique grass for fifteen years. Because of her work, she was recently granted over $250,000 from the National Science Foundation to fund her studies of this phenomenon in a field experiment with graduate students.
In the greenhouse on the third floor of Science Building 2, Eppley and her team of students try dissecting the grass to isolate it’s DNA and find out the sex of each specimen.
They do this because, based on their research, they found that the female grass has certain fungi in it’s roots that have proven helpful to it. The female grass can live in less salty and more nutrient rich areas, thus outliving the male grass.
“From an evolutionary perspective you have to ask why would they do this?” Eppley said.
The grass, which is native along the Northern California and Oregon coasts, is a rare find, because most plants are hermaphrodites, and when they weren’t, the sexes are spatially segregated. That is not the case with Distichlis spicata.
Eppley and her students are trying to figure out why this is true. They have run models to figure out the answer of why the females have developed a mutualism with the fungus and why the grass has integrated more than other plants. Eppley said she hasn’t come up with an answer yet.
“It’s really off the wall, there is something we really don’t understand about why plants in general have this funky system going on. We have got to get out in the field to answer that,” Eppley said.
The large budget for the project will go to getting the graduate students involved and buying the molecular markers needed to figure out the sex of the grass as well as other supplies. The experiment will take place first in the greenhouses around campus, which include the science building and the newly built ones behind the Peter W. Stott Center, and then to the Tillamook marsh. The group hopes to publish three to five papers on their findings.
Studying the grass and how it interacts with its environment is one of the most poignant elements of the study, according to Eppley.
“It will hopefully answer some of the questions we are wondering, such as: what causes stress?; what happens with global climate change?; and how it changes the distribution and makeup of species,” she said.