High above the rainforest floor, tiny ponds form in the leaves of plants perched on tree branches. Frogs breed in these ponds, alongside insects, microbes and even tiny crustaceans, creating miniature ecosystems suspended high in the canopy. These are the bromeliads – the remarkable plant family that also gave us air plants, the towering 12-metre “Queen of the Andes”, and the pineapple on your terrible pizza.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories. This article is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

Bromeliads are one of the great evolutionary success stories of the neotropics, the tropical ecosystems of the Americas. The ancestor of all living bromeliads existed just 20 million years ago, and since then, they have branched into about 3,800 species. To put this into perspective, hydrozoans – a lineage of predatory jellyfish-like animals – took more than 500 million years to evolve about 3,800 species.

Explaining how the remarkable plant biodiversity of the neotropics evolved remains one of the greatest challenges in evolutionary biology. Bromeliads, which are almost entirely unique to this region, provide one of the best natural experiments for investigation. My colleague Elizabeth Forward and I have........

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