The Serpentine Podcast on General Ecology

Victoria Sin: I've done some research in Octavia Butler's papers at the Huntington in LA and she, in her research for the Dean of Genesis series, had a focus on epiphytes. And there's this one plant that has so many different kinds of relationships that change over time with different species and is completely dependent. It starts out as often like innocent kind of commensalism when a plant benefits or an organism benefits from another organism without harming it at all. Then it kind of slowly morphs into parasitism and then one of them dies. Victoria Sin: The Strangler Fig thrives through this kind of really violent process but also creates space where birds and plants and