ABOVE: Cupped leaves observed on vines in Japan may help protect the plants’ fruit from the cold.
SAKAI SHOKO
In 2008, a letter arrived at the Center for Ecological Research at Kyoto University in Japan from a volunteer guide at a nature preserve in northern Honshu, asking about a strange phenomenon he had observed in a vine there. Some of the leaves of Schizopepon bryoniifolius, a gourd known in Japanese as miyama-nigauri, curved downward, forming a cup around the vine’s fruit, wrote the volunteer, Nobuyuki Nagaoka, a retired schoolteacher then around 80 years old, living near the foot of Mount Gassan. Did the scientists at the center know why?
One of the center’s researchers, Shoko Sakai, was designated to respond to the letter, and as she remembers it, it didn’t spark much interest for her. Her focus is on tropical plants, she explains, and she wasn’t familiar with the vine, which ...
