Summarizing a bit for those like me who are interested but not biologist-level interested: Eusociality is like bees that don't reproduce but support a queen th

Summarizing a bit for those like me who are interested but not biologist-level interested: Eusociality is like bees that don't reproduce but support a queen that does. With that in mind: > “[Ferns] at top seem to be water and nutrient capturers; ones below seem to store water.” [...] the number of reproductive [leaves/ferns] increased with the height of the colony, and 40% percent of ferns didn’t reproduce at all. Reproductive division of labor For textbook eusociality, there are two more conditions that have not yet been proven to be met by ferns. However, more interesting perhaps is > what defines an individual fern. If a colony can begin with a small plume of strap fronds sticking up from a few nest fronds and then spread asexually on the same roots, perhaps it is a single plant There is an argument to be made that they're not a single plant, because > [The ferns] differ markedly in morphology and reproduction depending on their role in the colony. So it hinges a bit on what you call eusocial and what you call a single plant. The headline made me think that ferns have a queen-like somehow or somewhere, and while there is some division of labor... the jury's still out on which definition it'll fall under, and it'll probably just end up being a footnote in a biology book somewhere. In conclusion, the interesting takeaway to me is that different ferns support each other, and 40% of them don't reproduce at all. There is a parallel to be made with how bees don't individually all reproduce, but whether the mechanism is actually identical to a meaningful extent is yet to be debated.