21–22 of 22 posts
Anyone who finds trees interesting should read Richard Powers's amazing, Pulitzer-winning book "The Overstory" http://www.richardpowers.net/the-overstory/
If you prefer video, this Ted Talk from Suzanne Simard does a good job of summarizing her team’s discoveries about how trees communicate. https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_e...
In Sheldrake's book, Engtangled Life, if I remember correctly, he suggests that it may be better not to think of it as trees communicating, but rather mycorrhizal networks passing on the information to other trees because it's in their interest to do so (the article posted alludes to this). It's similar to how mycorrhizal networks will transfer chemicals and nutrients between trees, because it's to their benefit to k…
I don’t remember if it’s in that episode or if I read it somewhere else, but fungi will also help parent trees to preferentially provide nutrients to their offspring over other trees of the same species. Perhaps that uses the same mechanism: “this tree tastes a lot like that one, let’s pool their resources.”
The more I learn about forests, the more I see them as superorganisms. I guess that’s what an ecosystem is; it’s just getting harder and harder for me to differentiate a cell vs a plant vs an animal vs an ecosystem in many ways—scale being the main difference, and complexity quite close to it. But that perceived complexity could be an artifact of my perspective as a conscious participant at the scale in which I live, and my familiarity with “what behaviors matter to humans and organisms more like humans.”
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/from-...