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September 23 - December 22, 2022
The giraffes there were feeding on umbrella thorn acacias, and the trees didn’t like this one bit. It took the acacias mere minutes to start pumping toxic substances into their leaves to rid themselves of the large herbivores.
The saliva of each species is different, and trees can match the saliva to the insect. Indeed, the match can be so precise that trees can release pheromones that summon specific beneficial predators.
they also warn each other using chemical signals sent through the fungal networks around their root tips, which operate no matter what the weather.
They started listening, and it didn’t take them long to discover that their measuring apparatus was registering roots crackling quietly at a frequency of 220 hertz.
Whenever the seedlings’ roots were exposed to a crackling at 220 hertz, they oriented their tips in that direction.
Before they bloom, they agree among themselves. Should they go for it next spring, or would it be better to wait a year or two? Trees in a forest prefer to bloom at the same time so that the genes of many individual trees can be well mixed.
Where do they store what they have learned and how do they access this information? After all, they don’t have brains to function as databases and manage processes. It’s the same for all plants, and that’s why some scientists are skeptical and why many of them banish to the realm of fantasy the idea of plants’ ability to learn.
when trees are really thirsty, they begin to scream.
Whether it’s a wolf ripping apart a wild boar or a deer eating an oak seedling, in both cases there is pain and death.
how this threatens to blur the boundary between plants and animals. And so what? What would be so awful about that? The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track? Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees
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There’s sucking and excreting going on everywhere.
The less integrated the tree is in a community of its own species, the greater the danger. Loners standing unprotected out in the cold fog succumb markedly more often than well-connected individuals in a dense forest who can lean on their neighbors for support.
just their seeds were imported, which means that most of the fungi and all of the insects remained back in their homelands.
And yet red wood ants are immigrants, too, and therefore, I would argue that no special efforts are necessary for their protection.
