
Plants talk to each other using an internet of fungus - dragonbonheur
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
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silveira
Slime Mold Physarum Finds the Shortest Path in a Maze -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czk4xgdhdY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czk4xgdhdY4)

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lgas
From that video I found this video, which has a similar treatment of finding
the shortest path in a maze as well as some more impressive feats (like
recreating the subway system of Tokyo).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lls27hu03yw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lls27hu03yw)

Pretty a-mazing.

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devindotcom
"Simard now believes large trees help out small, younger ones using the fungal
internet. Without this help, she thinks many seedlings wouldn't survive."

This feels backwards to me. It seems more likely that the fungus is the one
doing this, monitoring the condition of trees it touches and equalizing
nutrients to maximize their survivability — and its own, since it lives among
their roots.

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baddox
Isn't that a fairly arbitrary philosophical distinction? I'm not sure we can
say which organism _intends_ to distribute the resources, since that's a
fairly anthropocentric concept. I suppose one could ask whether the
relationship between the large tree and the fungus is beneficial to the large
tree despite the large tree losing some resources, but the answer seems to be
yes.

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devindotcom
Well, if you look at it from the ecosystem's standpoint, it's just a check or
balance. But the fungus is, like pretty much all life, acting in its own self-
interest. The trees don't even have to "consent" to this — it seems that it's
more likely that a fungus is acting as a sort of benevolent parasite than that
very different trees have established some kind of cross-platform messaging
system that uses a third, very different type of organism as a mediator. It's
just simpler to me to think that the fungus is acting on its own and it ends
up being a net gain for everyone involved.

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schiffern
>The trees don't even have to "consent" to this

The trees benefit as well — the fungus gives minerals, and in exchange the
trees give sugars. It's a transaction.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza#Sugar-
water.2Fminer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza#Sugar-
water.2Fmineral_exchange)

>benevolent parasite

The word you're looking for is "symbiosis".

It seems like you're trying hard to view this through a lens of competition
instead of cooperation.

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devindotcom
I'm aware of the word, I chose to say something different.

Why is competition a "lens" I must see through?

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kingakim
So just to clarify, this network is used primarily for transferring nutrients,
chemicals and the like? Not signals(data). Does the fact that plants respond
differently to differing stimuli imply that they have some information
processing mechanism?

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icegreentea
Chemicals are signals. For example, a hormone is pretty much by definition a
signaling chemical.

Plants most definitely have information processing. The entire process of 20th
century computation reveals that you can get 'intelligence' from really stupid
things (NAND gates) - conversing that we can have computation (and all that
implies) from a variety of different substrates (neurons, mechanical relays,
semi conductors, quantum bits, etc). People tend to get panicky and start
delineating things so that they can restrict plants from 'having thought' but
its all pretty silly.

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kingakim
I see, I understand that fundamentally chemicals are signals. I guess what I
meant was: could they use this basic "computation model" to pass complex
messages? For example, provided a plant is aware of it's distance from another
nearby connected plant, could it indicate via chemical signals that the soil
is richer here, grow your roots in this direction, conversely, the soil is
toxic here, grow your roots in the opposite direction?

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jameshart
That kind of interplant communication is subject to a prisoners'-dilemma-like
payoff matrix though. Yes, a plant species evolving a co-operative strategy
like that will do well, in aggregate, but individual plants which 'defect' and
advertise to other plants that the nutritious soil they have found is
poisonous and that other plants should keep away will outcompete its peers -
so defector genes will prosper in the population - except in the face of
plants which ignore their peers' chemical signals.

Overall, seems likely to be selected against as a strategy for individual
organisms.

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icegreentea
I think that the effectiveness of the strategy will depend on the specific
plant's pollination/seed dispersal mechanism. And it gets really weird when
you consider that you can have plants that over multiple seedling generations
(years really) that have a mix of clonal colonies and sexually reproduced
offspring dispersed around them.

To the original question, one obvious difficulty is considering how a
mechanism encoding directionality in a chemical signal can evolve. It's
certainly possible that these fungal networks are weakly directional, and it's
also possible for a plant to evolve some sort of gradient sensing mechanism if
its root network is sufficiently wide, but it -seems- unlikely. I would
totally love to see if we can find an example of it though - it would be sooo
cool.

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R_Edward
Fascinating. I had known for some time that oak trees will commingle their
roots, forming an oak internet. In good times, this helps smaller trees become
better established through resource-sharing with mature trees. Unfortunately,
the network doesn't just pass beneficial resources; it also passes the oak
wilt pathogen, so if one oak tree gets the wilt, it's a pretty good bet that
all the others in the immediate vicinity will get it too.

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custardcream
Sounds like an Orson Scott Card plot from Xenocide i.e. Descolada.

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drawkbox
Funny enough it was also a plot point in The Happening, supposedly the plants
had a network to kill humans off by dispersing a defensive component causing a
plague.

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undrcvr-lagggal
This reminds me of Alan Kay's thesis of similarities between biological
systems and object systems. Robustness is gained by dividing things into large
amounts of small cells communicating in an unrestricted graph topology. This
is basically how networks of REST speaking nodes work as well. All three of
these systems share more similarities than one might immediately realise. The
big idea is messaging.

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dreamweapon
This potentially quite a profound result -- especially if cooperative
behaviors and information processing capabilities comparable to that of, say,
insects or small animals (in the sense of _Animalia_ ) can be quantitatively
assessed.

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kirsebaer
PBS documentary "What Plants Talk About"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrG-42uCDj4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrG-42uCDj4)

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bejuizb123
Wonder what sort of neutrality situation they have.

