You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.

Hello, Will. Hello, David.

Hello, listeners, and welcome to Common Descent, a podcast about paleontology, evolution,

the history of life on Earth.

This is episode 235 long-time listeners know what that means, plants time.

Woo!

This episode, our topic, is aquatic plants. Pl plants that are specially adapted for life aquatic.

And as usual, since neither will nor I know anything about plants, we will be joined for this

discussion by our favorite guest of the podcast, Dr. Ali Baumgartner, plant expert extraordinaire,

who will talk to us about what makes a plant aquatic, what adaptations allow plants to be aquatic,

and what we know about the deep history and evolution of aquatic plants.

Yeah.

I feel like this is one of those categories people might not consider because, like, animals that go back to water get fins and flippers and very clearly.

But many water plants to us, laymen's just look like more plants.

Just more plants. That's just plants, but what?

Yeah, I had never put much thought to how tough must it be to not grow in dirt, or at least

grow in dry dirt.

Well, you know who put more thought into it than we did?

All the people who requested this topic for

us to talk about. This, we had to do this episode because the request, the list of requesters

was racking up. This topic was requested by Josiah Eliza, Lydia, Athena, Luke, gazeboist,

Allison, Varroon, leaf-billed species, Tony, Azola event, Lori, Noah, Amber, Mercedes, Ryan, Nina, Tara, Emmett, Chris, Richard, Amanda, Eschavaria, Cinder, and Jackie.

...