A 7-year field experiment showed Antarctica’s native grass and pearlwort reworking their internal plumbing in contrasting ways as temperatures shifted.

Each summer for more than a decade, Patricia Sáez and her colleagues have traveled to King George Island, off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, to check on the only two flowering species native to Antarctica.

Antarctic hair grass (Deschampsia antarctica) and Antarctic pearlwort (Colobanthus quitensis) have both spread quickly as the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed. In fact, between 1960 and 2009, each species’ range roughly tripled.

However, a study published in Physiologia Plantarum showed that the two plants are coping with a changing climate in opposite ways. After 7 years in experimental warming chambers, the grass moved less water through its leaves and photosynthesized less compared with grass growing outside the chambers. The pearlwort did the reverse.