The Subject Today Is Trees
Bears eat fish, fungi eat fish, fungi feed fish to the forest.
There is now a substantial body of scientific evidence showing that trees of the same species are communal, and often form alliances with trees of other species. Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence.
Trees have friends. Trees can be very considerate in sharing the sunlight, and their root systems are closely connected. Yeah, it’s the wood wide web, OK, now let’s move on. All the trees in a forest are connected through underground fungal networks, through which they share water and nutrients and use them to communicate. The hairlike root tips of trees join together with microscopic fungal filaments to form the basic links of the network, which appears to operate as a symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi.
The fungi consume about 30 percent of the sugar that trees photosynthesize from sunlight. The sugar is what fuels the fungi, as they scavenge the soil for nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients, which are then absorbed and consumed by the trees. To communicate…
