"They Get Along, They Listen"- Experts Uncover the Hidden Language of Trees

Suzanne Simard transformed our reasoning about plants and fungi with the woodwide web discovery. The recent book of the ecologist discloses the intelligence of a life of listening to the forest, claiming that trees have a secret language.

(Photo : Mali Maeder)

The Remarkable Discovery

When Suzanne Simard made her remarkable findings - that trees had the ability to communicate and cooperate via subterranean networks of fungi - the scientific initiation underreacted. Though her doctoral study was released in the Nature journal in 1997 - a coup for any researcher - the discovery that trees are more beneficent than competitive was discharged by many as if it were the misunderstanding of an anthropomorphizing hippy.

Presently, at 60-year-old, she is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and her research of over three decades as a "forest detective" is well-known worldwide. In her recent book titled Finding the Mother Tree, which is a scientific memoir as engrossing as any HBO drama series - she wants it known that her work has not a been brief experience: "I want people to be aware that what I've found has been about my entire life."

Also Read: Natural Forest Regeneration: Better than Tree Planting?

The Hidden Life of Trees 

Her moment has arrive: research into ecosystems of forest and mycorrhizal networks - those built of attachment between plants and fungi is presently mainstream and people are hungry for books pertaining to the subject: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake - concerning the hidden life of fungi -  expand her reasoning about the "woodwide web", while the female main character of Richard Powers's Pulitzer prize-winning 2018 novel titled The Overstory is said to have been motivated by Simard.

She is strolling in Pacific Spirit Park on the western edge of Vancouver - home is in Nelson, British Columbia, after concluding an audio recording of her book, and she is depending on a video call to communicate (there is no woodwide web for us).

On a phone screen, the forest leaps into sight in all its spotted majesty as Simard raise her phone high to reveal the dizzying perpendiculars of douglas firs, a sequence of spires, and to show a "mother tree" and  - the one with the highest height in the forest, taking care of the smaller trees all over it.

(Photo : Johannes Plenio)

Destruction Commercial Clear-cutting Causes 

She homes in on a cedar, then stares at the understory - a tangle of mosses, hemlock, and sword fern. What can't be seen while passing is the fungi that are threadlike that combine with the roots of trees, assisting them to take out nutrients and water like nitrogen and phosphorus in exchange for sugars that are carbon-rich produced through photosynthesis. It is early spring and, she gave a report, "cool - approximately 16 degrees, I will be needing my jacket. The atmosphere is wet, fresh- soft."

Simard had gotten much knowledge from her initial job with a logging company (Simard was the only female employee) concerning the destruction commercial clear-cutting could cause in a forest. 

Related Article: Study Finds that the Largest Trees Capture Much More Carbon and Dominate Forest Carbon Storage

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