With a couple of exceptions—like Dawkins’ /The Selfish Gene/—Biology has never held the fascination for me that many other subjects do. Nonetheless, I was drawn to The New York Times Magazine article, The Social Life of Forests. The TL;DR is that the trees in a forest have a way of communicating and even sharing nutrients with each other.
The article starts with the observation that after a forest has been clear cut and replanted, the saplings don’t to as well as expected. After all, they have more space, less competition, and more sunlight so it was surprising then they tended to die more often and generally be less healthy than the trees before the clearcutting. Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, has a life-long love of forest and trees and set out to discover why this was so. What she discovered was astounding.
The trees in a forest are linked by fibers of fungus in what’s called a mycorrhizal network. These networks pass along chemical danger signals from one tree to the others but even more significantly they help distribute nutrients and carbon among the trees. The flow of these nutrients tend to be towards the trees that need it the most at the moment. It’s typical for the flow to change directions with the seasons as the needs of the trees change.
The article was fascinating for me and probably will be for most other nerds. It really is worth reading if only to discover how strange and counterintuitive the world can be. It’s also an inspiring story of how Simard persevered in the face of rejection of her ideas by the scientific establishment and became recognized as the leading expert in her field.