
Do trees communicate? Networks, networks - miraj
http://abject.ca/do-trees-communicate/
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Alex3917
But wait, it gets even more trippy. One of the biggest reasons why the trees
need to do this is because when a tree gets attacked by a disease in the
spring or early summer, it ends up losing most of its leaves before the fall.
Because of this it hasn't yet stored up enough energy to survive the winter,
so the tree is likely to either die or else be seriously weakened, and it will
definitely die if the same thing happens the next year. The mycorrhizal
networks can warn of advance attacks, transmit enough energy to get the tree
through the winter if a tree has already succumbed, and maybe even transmit
some sort of antibodies as well. The kicker? Most of these tree diseases are
other funguses. So the whole thing is really some kind of slow motion LOTR-
style epic battle.

~~~
DaniFong
High drama in the forests!

It's not just this fungal battle -- my friend, the fire ecologist, explains
how fire has existed pretty much since plant life, and therefore plants evolve
strategies for handling fire.

Some trees, like pines, make flammable sap to induce fire, and then only grow
once a fire has happened -- the ecological niche having been cleared out.

Some trees, like oaks, hate fire, and so mat the forest floor with fire
suppressing leaves.

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blhack
This is astonishing, but not _too_ surprising. It seems natural (because it
is, ha), that any system that is allowed to evolve would evolve the ability to
gather information from its surrounding environment. If that environment
includes trees, then it holds that trees would be able to "communicate" with
each other. (In this case, the communication is just reading the state of your
neighbors)

The interesting thing to me about this is it kindof forces us to examine life
in a different way (not because it's a new finding, just because it is being
presented to us).

Consider the "Chinese Brain" thought experiment:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain>

To paraphrase: sentience can be looked at as an emergent property of
complexity, especially in a lossy system.

I guess the point I'm kindof dancing around here (because it sounds silly) is:
what are the emergent properties of enormous, several billion member sensor
networks like a forest? To an outside observer, perhaps looking at this on a
different time scale than we do, is there something more there than just wood
and leaves?

Something people get hung up on when talking about "life" on other planets is
this idea that the life would look anything even remotely like us, or share
our concepts of language. If (as the chinese brain thought experiment
suggests) sentience can emerge from complexity, then maybe there is sentient
life on other planets (or our own planet) that just lives in a totally,
totally different timescale, or concept of communication than we do.

Another way of saying this is: think of the trees like cells in your body.

~~~
trotsky
It's an interesting question. When you look at the vast complexity, diversity
and synergy in the natural world it certainly represents a body of work that
far exceeds mankinds best achievements so far. If I'm smarter than a monkey
because I can build a house then it only seems reasonable to recognize a
greater intelligence in the system that built the earth. If we once
encountered an abandoned alien city with materials and design way beyond our
reach everyone would assume they were smarter than us without ever meeting
one. Maybe we just have too narrow a definition of intelligence.

~~~
tybris
Are you trying to turn this into an intelligent design argument?

Human life is short, so instead of going through lengthy trial-and-error, like
nature does, our brains evolved to make complex predictions about our
environment based on past observations and simulation. That's what we call
intelligence. It's not necessarily the best way to build something complex,
but it is fast enough to be useful in a life time. I don't see any reason to
assign additional meanings to the word like "how well a system is built" or to
personify evolution into something other than a trial-and-error process.

~~~
true_religion
I think he was going for Gaia Hypothesis.

Simply put: what if the entire ecology of the planet is part of an integrated
system that has an intelligence of its own, motives of its own, and merely
operates at an epic time scale.

Just as the bacteria in our stomachs don't know they're contributing to our
well being, so also may we not know that we're contributing to the well being
of Gaia.

The issue I have with that is that it seems unproveable, and therefore its
truth or falsity has no impact on our daily lives.

~~~
jackbravo
Right. But also, we wouldn't be a bacteria in the stomach contributing to the
well being. We seem more like a virus. Or maybe I'm just thinking in a too
short time span.

~~~
Ralith
A harmful mutation, perhaps, but as grandparent observed, there's really no
useful predictions to be made by this theory.

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Yhippa
I am not a biologist and this definitely surprised me. I always thought that
plants and trees were in a constant struggle to see who could grow the tallest
and get more leaf surface area facing the sun to get the most resources. The
fact that these trees aren't completely selfish is what surprises me.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, that's what I was taught in school, on biology lessons - trees competing
for sunlight.

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monkeypizza
the original (& better) link - scroll down a bit.
[http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/potd/2010/03/mycorrhizal_n...](http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/potd/2010/03/mycorrhizal_networks.php)

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hybrid11
so Avatar got it right after all :)

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raldi
When a headline ends in a question mark, and the question can be answered
either "yes" or "no", it's never yes.

~~~
humbledrone
I agree with your sentiment (that headlines containing question marks are
generally conjecture and not news), but in this case the answer pretty clearly
is "yes, trees do communicate." To be sure, it's not a great headline, but it
was chosen by the original author so maybe you should post a comment on his
blog if you're concerned.

~~~
raldi
Sorry, I don't see any examples in the article where trees communicate, just
that they tap into each other's resources. Was there more to it than that?

If not, that's a pretty misleading headline. When I water a plant, it's not
communicating with the garden hose.

~~~
Meai
That depends on how you define 'communicating'. It's all essentially about
definitions and opinions. This is probably a tad too cynical, but to me it
seems most every discussion boils down to these two things. We'd really need a
better framework for discussing these things, I think we'd waste a lot less
time arguing over semantics. A beautiful example is the discussion whether God
exists or not. If you could just force both participants to define what God
is, then the discussion over his existence would be over in seconds. (with the
conclusion that there is no way of knowing, so let's stop talking about it)

~~~
puredemo
That's usually how it goes if you aren't talking to someone who is being
intellectually dishonest. Over in a few minutes.

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kaichanvong
All I could think about while watching this was the coffee experiment and how
Sam Odio took the nutrients from all the trees for his own purposes.

We could learn a lot from these trees and how they are so selfless for the
preservation and happiness of the future!

~~~
db48x
Trees aren't selfless, nor do they care about happiness or the future. They
are simply machines programmed to work a certain way.

In this case it would be better to see the tree as pulling the nutrients it
needs from wherever they happen to be available. The fungus network it's
connected to is simply trying to balance nutrient availability across it's
subunits, and is also pulling nutrients from wherever they are available, even
if that is other trees in the network. Those other trees end up suffering (or
at best grow more slowly) but it's not like they can complain. That this adds
up to improved odds of survival for the forest as a whole is merely good
robust system design. One day we'll take as much care in our own work. The
internet is certainly not so robust.

