The Monkeyflower Mystery | Tumble Episode
- tumblepodcast
- Oct 4, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 18, 2025
Why do plants grow in different places? How do they adapt to different environments? 🌱🌼🔍Join plant scientist David Lowry on a journey where picking flowers on the side of the road leads to asking big questions about how life evolves - and it might change what you think about what makes a species.🤯
Learn more about David and the science of species in our bonus interview extra on Patreon!
🎧 Listen to the Episode
🔎About The Featured Expert
David Lowry is a plant biologist and professor at Michigan State University and the Associate Director of the MSU Plant Resilience Institute. David studies plant speciation and genetics, along with how ecological adaptations contribute to the formation of new species.
Hear from David in our previous episode The Seed Treasure Hunt. Click here to listen and read about David's Beal Seed Experiment - which we updated you about in 2022.
The Monkeyflower
According to The University of Connecticut's Yuan Laboratory, "the genus Mimulus (monkeyflowers) contains 160-200" variations. Below are just a few examples of how different each one looks. The differences are nuts!
Photo credit: brewbooks on Flickr]
Photo Credit: Public domain.
Photo credit: Tgnil, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Here's a neat video of David, his monkeyflowers, and his lab:
This is the video that Lindsay shows Marshall in the episode. Here, you can observe the growth of the inland annual (right) and coastal perennial (left). If you want to learn more about David's lab's research, click here.
Curious about species after this episode's cliffhanger? Check out this video from SciShow:
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