Equatorial temperatures spiked, making much of the land too hot for life. Meanwhile, the oceans became acidic and most of the creatures in them suffocated from lack of oxygen. Known as the Permian-Triassic mass extinction or the "Great Dying," it ultimately destroyed more than 90% of ocean life and 70% of terrestrial species.
"Plants do indeed sometimes have a lot of resilience because they can't move individually, and even as a population, they're not very good at moving," Chris Thomas, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of York in the U.K., told Live Science. As a result, many plants have evolved mechanisms to survive in place despite difficult conditions, he said.
Unlike most animals, many plants have the ability to regenerate limbs — and those limbs can make them better able to adapt to new environment conditions. Plants in general have higher developmental plasticity than animals, which means that they have greater flexibility to change how their cells and tissues grow and develop.
"If we lost an arm, it would be gone forever. But on plants, if you cut off a branch, they can sprout new ones and those new ones can then receive signals from the current environment instead of being stuck with sort of developmental programs from the past environment."
And because buds can go dormant, many plant species can resprout after catastrophic events, such as fire. Cape Floristic Region in South Africa, for example, is the smallest of the world's six recognized floral kingdoms, and most of its plant species depend on fire — its plants resprout after fire and many of their seeds require fire to germinate.
Snow gums (Eucalyptus pauciflora) under snow at Mount Franklin, Namadgi National Park, Australia. (Image credit: Auscape via Getty Images)
Storing seeds for better times
Plants can also store seeds underground when times are difficult. Almost 350,000 plant species produce seeds. For most of these species, the seeds contain dormant tiny versions of the young plant, with all the structures that will turn into leaves and roots.
Seed banks are a vital tool for resilience in many plant species. They create the opportunity for metabolically inactive individuals to reanimate when environmental conditions improve, according to a 2021 paper published in the journal Nature Communications. "When lucky, at least some of these individuals will awaken in the future when the environment is more conducive for growth and reproduction," the authors wrote.
"The raw material for adaptation comes from genetic variation," said Angert. "Genetic variation is larger in large populations, and genetic variation can be shared between populations as the environment changes — if individuals can disperse successfully between them."
"They can either grow really fast, flower and put out seeds before the fall drought takes effect, or they can grow much more slowly and bunker down,” Anstett explained.
Scarlet Monkeyflower (Erythranthe Cardinalis) in a greenhouse drought experiment. (Image credit: Daniel Anstett)They found that, based on populations’ genetic diversity, they could predict whether a population would be able to survive the drought — even before it started.
Flexible photosynthesis
Some plants are able to transform how they produce energy to endure a changing environment. This is what Zhen Xu, a paleobotanist at the University of Leeds in the U.K, thinks allowed some plant species to survive the Permian-Triassic mass extinction and might become increasingly important for plants in today's changing climate.
Reproductive cone (strobilus) of a Triassic lycophyte from South China. It is approximately 2.4 inches (6 centimeters long). (Image credit: Zhen Xu)
Many plants open their stomata during the day to let in CO2 and release oxygen. Others use CAM photosynthesis, which stands for "Crassulacean acid metabolism," to close their stomata during the day and protect themselves from the heat. At night, they absorb CO2 and transform it into an acid, which they store in their tissues to be used to make sugars during the day.
In a study published in journal Nature Ecology & Evolution earlier this year, Xu and colleagues showed that plants that used CAM photosynthesis had an advantage during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
Some plants go to even more extreme lengths. During cataclysmic events, plants have turned into "hopeful monsters" to survive environmental upheaval, past research shows.
"We see clusterings of whole genome duplications in time, and every time it corresponds with a described, important geological event, whether it's a global cooling period, whether it's a global warming period, or whether there's an extinction event," study co-author Yves Van de Peer, a genome biologist at Ghent University in Belgium, told Live Science at the time.
Boils down to luck
Plants "essentially have this broad toolkit" but "some of the plants have some pathways, and other plants have others, and some have some traits, and some have others", Anstett said. Whether the particular tools they have will help depends on the conditions they face.
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"The best thing we could do is to leave larger and better connected populations on the landscape," she said.
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