A World with Intelligent Plants
A planet in our solar system contains plants that use web-like networks that allow for the transportation of life sustaining nutrients, and communication signals. They transport chemical signals, and electrical communication signals similar to a neural network in a human brain. The plants can also smell, taste, hear, and feel. This planet is the 3rd closest to the Sun, and it’s known by the name Earth. Yes, Earth.
It may see like something out of a science fiction movie, but it’s 100% real. Underground there are networks made up of mycelium, connecting trees and plants together, allowing for the exchange of nutrients, and communication through their roots. Mycelia are the branching, thread-like structures of fungal masses. Although they make up the bulk of a fungal mass, we tend to be more familiar with their fruiting bodies (mushrooms), as mycelia reside mostly underground.
Mycelium grow out from the root tips of trees and plants, creating a mycorrhizal network. This symbiotic, mycorrhizal network interconnects trees and other plants, allowing them to share nutrients. When one plant has an excess amount of carbon or nitrogen, it will transport the nutrients through this network to neighboring trees that are also tapped in. This sharing of nutrients allows plants in less ideal areas, or less ideal conditions to prosper from the help of its neighboring plants. The mycelium benefit from these interactions and transfers by keeping a portion of the sugars that are created by the trees through photosynthesis.
Even more impressive, adult trees carry out their roles as “mothers” by passing nutrients to seedlings, creating a better succession rate for their survival. Seedlings don’t receive enough light to photosynthesize appropriately to create their own sugar, so they rely on their neighboring trees heavily through the mycorrhizal network. When it comes to animals mothers will generally prioritize the well being of their own children. Similarly, it has been observed that adult trees will pass more nutrients to their own offspring seedlings than they will to those that are not their offspring.
When it comes to varying species of plants it was often thought that trees competed for resources. But when explored on a deeper level it was found that in some cases they actually help each other. For example, when birch trees grow taller than neighboring conifers and shade them out they will provide them with carbon during summer months when their branches are covered in leaves. The more a bitch tree shades out a conifer, the more carbon it provides to that tree. This favor is returned in spring and fall when birch trees are leafless. At this time in the year conifers will return the favor by sharing carbon with the birches.
Transporting and trading nutrients is not the only benefit of mycorrhizal networks. Plants also use this web-like structure as means of communication. They will send chemical, hormonal, and slow-pulsing, voltage based, electrical signals (similar to those of animal nervous systems) through the mycorrhizal networks as means of communication.
The main information passed between plants is that of stress. For example, when a plant’s leaves are being eaten by a pest, it will send a warning to surrounding trees, giving them a head start on increasing chemical defenses to combat the pests. It has also been theorized that some plants may also emit and detect sound through their root systems at a frequency of 220 hertz, outside of the human hearing range. One could consider this ability to be categorized as speaking and hearing.
All of these incredible life sustaining abilities have been made possible to plants by the mycelia that make up the mycorrhizal network, but it would not be symbiotic if only the plants benefited from this relationship. The mycelia benefit by “charging” for their services, payable in the form of sugar. Fungi will receive as much as thirty percent of the sugars that a plant produces. The sugar acts as a food source to the fungi, which it uses to grow and spread, and to search for nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. These nutrients are then absorbed and transported back through the network to the plants.
In addition to the mycorrhizal networks between the roots of trees, plants have been observed using other means of communication. Some plants have been documented using scent signals, such as pheromones or ethylene gas. Nearby plants can “smell” the release from neighboring plants in stress, giving them an opportunity to up their defenses before danger arrives.
Since sensing pheromones through leaves can be qualified as having a sense of smell, some have gone as far to say that some plants can also taste. When elms and pines come under attack by leaf eating caterpillars, their leaves absorb and detect the caterpillars saliva. The trees respond by producing pheromones that attract parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside of caterpillars. The larvae eat the caterpillars, and in return protect the trees; reciprocity for the trees informing the wasps of prime hosts for their young.
Plants are often thought of as being sedentary, simple, and mostly defenseless organisms that rely solely on their own defenses for survival. They’re often believed to be competing with individuals around them, and are simply trying to survive and spread their seeds before succumbing to predators, disease, or if lucky death by old age. In reality, plants are communal, intelligent, interconnected, complex species. They nurture each other, protect themselves and their communities in ingenious ways, and even relay information to each other through various means of communication. They speak, they hear, they smell, and they taste. In our perceivable world, plants are silent recluses. But when looked at a little more closely, it becomes apparent that they are social, interconnected, intelligent creatures.
If we listen closely to them, maybe we’ll learn to hear what they have to say.
Sources:
https://mothertreeproject.org/about-mother-trees/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/
