WOOD WIDE WEB

Communication is a vital point and bedrock of relationships among living organisms. We conveynformations in our social enviroments through communication, thus living organisms would find live a bore and burdensome if communication wasn't invented. So clever and intelligent was God himself, for through the creation process, He spoke and commanded all His creation, thus emphasising the importance of communication.

Naturally, human communicate with their mouth, eyes, touch and so on, also animals were said to have their means of communication, but how do plants especially trees communicate?

Over centuries, fungi were generally believed to be harmful to plants, parasites that cause disease and dysfunction. But recently, it has been understood that certain kinds of common fungi exist in subtle symbiosis with plants, bringing about not infection but connection. These fungi send out gossamer-fine fungal tubes called hyphae, which penetrate the soil and weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level. Roots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza. Mycorrhiza is a combination of two Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web.

The relationship between these mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is now known to be ancient (around 450,000,000 years old) and largely one of mutualism—a subset of symbiosis in which both organisms benefit from their association. In the case of the mycorrhizae, the fungi siphon off food from the trees, taking some of the carbon-rich sugar that they produce during photosynthesis. The plants, in turn, obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil, by means of enzymes that the trees do not possess.

The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources—sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus—between one another. For instance, a dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. For instance a plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it.

It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more precise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net.

However, the revelation of the Wood Wide Web’s existence, and the increased understanding of its functions, raised some big questions like:--

Where species begin and end?
Whether a forest can be better imagined as a superorganism rather than a grouping of independent individualistic ones?
What trading, sharing and frienship might mean among plants

Sam Petros