Frondly Focused on Ferns

From Plant Press Vol. 16 no. 4, October 2013

By Gary A. Krupnick

Eric Schuettpelz, in this self-portrait, joined the staff of the Department of Botany as Research Botanist and Assistant Curator of Ferns in August 2013.

The Department of Botany recently hired two new curators. Eric Schuettpelz, a systematic biologist recognized for his work on fern diversification, has joined the staff as Research Botanist and Assistant Curator of Ferns, and Ashley N. Egan, a systematic biologist with expertise in phylogenomics and bioinformatics, has been appointed as Research Botanist and Assistant Curator of Legumes. They both started in August 2013. The fern and legume holdings at the U.S. National Herbarium are large and significant. New curation and research will be highly beneficial. Egan and the legume collection will be profiled in a future issue of the Plant Press, while Schuettpelz and the fern collection are profiled here.

The fern collection at the U.S. National Herbarium currently totals approximately 275,000 specimens and is thought to be the largest fern collection in the new world. Known for having an especially rich collection of types—just under 5,500 catalogued type specimens—the collection results from a long history of pteridological research at the Smithsonian Institution. Remarkably, the collection has had continuous curation for over 100 years.

William R. Maxon built the fern collection from almost nothing to over 150,000 specimens in the early 20^th century. Maxon was initially appointed as an aide in the Division of Plants of the U.S. National Museum in 1899 and eventually rose to become Curator of the U.S. National Herbarium in 1937, a position he held until his retirement in 1946. The collections he personally contributed primarily stem from trips to Jamaica, Cuba, and Central America.

Conrad V. Morton was trained under the tutelage of Maxon. His initial appointment at the Smithsonian was as an Assistant Curator of Phanerogams in the Division of Plants in 1939. In 1946, when the Division was reorganized as the Department of Botany, Morton was appointed Associate Curator of the Division of Ferns. He held the title of Curator of the Division of Ferns until 1970. Morton collected extensively in Guatemala, Honduras, and the West Indies.

David B. Lellinger began as an herbarium aide in 1960, and was hired as a member of the staff in 1963. He began co-authoring articles about South American ferns with Morton as early as 1966. Lellinger continued to build the fern collection, primarily with specimens from Costa Rica, Panama, and the Chocó in Colombia. He also published a landmark book, A Field Manual of the Ferns & Fern-Allies of the United States and Canada (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

Gregory S. McKee, museum specialist, began assisting Lellinger in 1998, and continued to oversee the fern collection as acting fern curator after Lellinger’s retirement in 2002. McKee will be assisting Schuettpelz in managing the fern collection.

Eric Schuettpelz grew up in northeastern Wisconsin, and spent much of his childhood outdoors exploring the woods. In 1995, he began his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a pre-med student. Not happy with this decision, Schuettpelz had what he calls an “awakening” in his junior year when he took a plant systematics course taught by Sara B. Hoot, a Ranunculaceae specialist. Schuettpelz recalls deciding right then, as a naive undergraduate, that he wanted to be a systematic botanist. Later that year he began an undergraduate research project with Hoot, focusing on the biogeography of the windflower genus Anemone (Ranunculaceae) in the Southern Hemisphere.

Schuettpelz received a B.S. in Biological Sciences in 1999, and continued on in Hoot’s lab as a master’s student, investigating the phylogeny and biogeography of the marsh marigold genus Caltha (Ranunculaceae). He recalls ironically that as a child he would gather huge “cowslip” bouquets from the ditches around his grandparents’ house. He completed his M.S. in Biological Sciences in 2001.

It was during his time as a master’s student that Schuettpelz first got excited about pteridophytes, thanks primarily to Hoot’s collaboration with W. Carl Taylor, an Isoëtes (quillwort) specialist. Following conversations with Hoot, Taylor, and James P. Therrien (a postdoctoral fellow in Hoot’s lab), Schuettpelz decided he wanted to pursue a Ph.D. focused on ferns. During this time, he also learned of Kathleen M. Pryer (then at the Field Museum) and was captivated by her work on fern evolution.

In 2001, when Pryer took a position at Duke University, Schuettpelz joined her lab as her first doctoral student. As a new student, his first task was, along with Pryer and Harald Schneider (a postdoctoral fellow in Pryer’s lab), to identify a dissertation topic. Early on, Schuettpelz explored biogeographical questions surrounding Pterozonium (Pteridaceae) and Hymenophyllopsis (Cyatheaceae), which led to his first visit to the U.S. National Herbarium (Lellinger had published earlier treatments of these genera). The logistics of working on this group centered on the tepuis of Venezuela ultimately proved too overwhelming for a beginning doctoral student.

In the summer of 2002, Schuettpelz took a course in tropical plant systematics offered by the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. One of the course instructors was Robbin C. Moran, curator of ferns at the New York Botanical Garden, who introduced Schuettpelz to the incredible diversity of ferns inhabiting tropical rain forests. Schuettpelz was especially fascinated by the epiphytic ferns and pursued a course project centered on epiphyte diversity. By the end of the course, he had decided on a dissertation topic—the evolution and diversification of epiphytic ferns.

The hairy Cheilanthes pohliana Mett. is native to the Brazilian cerrado. (Photo by Eric Schuettpelz)

Schuettpelz got off to a strong start—his first fern-centered publication attracted wide attention (Schneider et al. 2004. Nature 428: 553-557). This study examined the diversification of ferns relative to the diversification of flowering plants, and one of the main findings was that polypod ferns diversified primarily in the Cretaceous, after angiosperms. This conflicted with the general notion that fern diversity declined as a result of flowering plant diversification and suggested that the diversification of angiosperms may have presented an ecological opportunity for ferns. In his research on the evolution of epiphytism in ferns, Schuettpelz found that this particular habit evolved, and was also lost, many times. But perhaps most interesting was the finding that the diversification of epiphytic ferns was relatively recent—primarily occurring after the K/T boundary and the likely establishment of angiosperm-dominated tropical rainforests (PNAS 106: 11200-11205; 2009).

Schuettpelz’s most frequently cited work, co-authored with Alan R. Smith (Curator of Ferns at the University of California Berkeley Herbarium) and others, is a well-regarded classification for ferns (Taxon 55: 705-731; 2006).

Eric Schuettpelz plans to continue his studies of xeric-adapted cheilanthoids, such as Pellaea cymbiformis J. Prado. (Photo by Eric Schuettpelz)

Schuettpelz completed his Ph.D. in 2007, but remained at Duke University for another two years as a postdoctoral fellow, focused primarily on the systematics and evolution of the cheilanthoid ferns, a diverse clade common in xeric habitats, including the deserts of the southwestern United States and Mexico. Schuettpelz also spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a scientific research center promoting collaborative, cross-disciplinary research in evolutionary biology. In 2010, he began a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which he held for three years until his recent move to the Smithsonian Institution.

At the Smithsonian, Schuettpelz will continue his research program centered on elucidating the evolutionary history of ferns. In the near term, his work will focus on lineages within the Pteridaceae. He will continue his phylogenetic and biogeographical studies of the xeric-adapted cheilanthoid clade. His research into the evolution of epiphytism will concentrate on the shoestring ferns (vittarioids), a pantropical group of about 125 species that is almost exclusively epiphytic. Sister to the maidenhair ferns (Adiantum), these epiphytes are notable for their highly reduced morphology and fast rate of molecular evolution. Schuettpelz hopes to shed light on the evolution of this extreme morphological, ecological, and apparently genomic makeover in ferns.

This fern from Bolivia and Brazil is currently known as Adiantum senae Baker, but the new combination to Adiantopsis senae is in review. (Photo by Eric Schuettpelz)

Schuettpelz’s previous fieldwork has taken him to the neotropics (Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Brazil), as well as the paleotropics (Taiwan and Malaysia). If collecting permits come through, he wishes to return soon to Southeast Asia to collect vittarioids, and to further build the impressive fern collection at the U.S. National Herbarium.

Having such an important and large fern collection was the impetus to hire a fern specialist in the Department of Botany. An active Curator of Ferns will maintain the collection making it easier for visitors to access and extract information from it, especially if it is arranged phylogenetically. With Schuettpelz on board, the collection will continue to receive the attention it deserves. Within his first few weeks on the job, the vittarioids were reorganized and he plans to tackle the remainder of the Pteridaceae (currently divided into the Adiantaceae, Parkeriaceae, Pteridaceae, and Vittariaceae) this fall. Soon, the arrangement of the entire fern collection will reflect a current understanding of fern phylogeny.