You’re Not Weird If You Think Trees Have Conversations
By: Erik Brown
Tags: Nature, Life Lessons, Environment, Technology, Science

More Than What You See

Photo by Rishi Deep on Unsplash

“A forest is much more than what you see…underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate…and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.” — Suzanne Simard, forest ecologist, 2016 Ted Talk

Harris references a book called “What A Plant Knows” by plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz. In his book Chamovitz explains that plants can react to outside stimuli in ways that are startling and mainly go unnoticed. In particular, plants can sense touch and also show indications that they have memory.

Chamovitz explains that vines can change the rate and the direction of their growth when it senses by touch something to grow around. Venus fly traps can also tell the difference between the touch of wind and rain versus the pressure from the touch of an insect or animal.

He also explains that plants show some form of memory. For instance, venus fly traps have hairs on them that when touched will close their leaves around an insect. Two hairs need to be touched before they will close. So, it ‘remembers’ that the first hair is touched before the second hair triggers the closing. Similarly, Chamovitz explains that wheat seedlings ‘remember’ they’ve gone through a winter before flowering.

Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard believes trees can communicate with each other. In her 2016 Ted Talk, she details experiments she’s done over 30 years that she says prove this.

In her first study to prove her hypothesis, she took Paper Birch and Douglas Fir trees and planted them together. She used tracer elements of carbon 14 gas and carbon 13 gas. She bagged the trees and put an individual gas in the bags with each individual species of tree. After sitting for an hour, she removed the bags and found that the birch and fir trees were passing the carbon back and forth when she analyzed them with a geiger counter.

In this particular experiment, the birch sent carbon to the fir, which she covered with a blanket and shielded from light exposure. In other instances she found the fir sending carbon to the birch trees.

Mycorrhizal Networks — Drawing By Nefronus Via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Simard explains that this carbon is being passed through mycorrhizal networks that originate from fungi. The top mushroom part of the fungus you see has threads called mycelium coming out of the bottom of it that interconnect with the roots of trees. The fungus and tree exchange nutrients and products from photosynthesis this way.

This network can also be used to trade carbon between trees and also information. For instance, trees can alert other trees of harmful insects. The network can be so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under your feet.

In further experiments, Simard also found that ‘mother trees’ can recognize their ‘offspring’. Through monitoring isotope exchanges, she found that the parent tree will give more carbon to trees that were its ‘children’. The parent tree will also reduce their root competition with the related tree as well. Defense signals were also sent from ‘parent’ to ‘child’.

It appears this mycorrhizal network functions as a plant internet of sorts. Some even call it the wood wide web.