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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even that is assuming that life on other planets is made out of matter rather than light, consciousness, etc. "Reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose."
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
