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 through the network, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals.
Forest ecologist Allen Larocque (University of British Columbia, Mother Tree Network) isolated salmon nitrogen isotopes in fungal samples taken from forest soils in British Columbia. His team was studying trees that grow near salmon streams. It happens that salmon nitrogen has a very distinctive chemical signature and is easy to recognize. Larocque observed that bears sit under trees and eat salmon. They leave the fish carcasses on the ground and the trees are absorbing salmon nitrogen, and then sharing it with each other through the network. So it’s a four-part system in which the fish feed the bears, and the bears feed the fish to the fungi in the soil, and the fungi feed the forest. Fish-bear-forest floor-fungi-forest tree.
Once again: We are all related.
@ Martha. I read somewhere that certain trees on the East Coast form forests by actually growing new 'trees' from a single genetic base, a single root structure. What looks like a forest to us is actually a single tree! Trippy. I'm reminded of a poem by W. S. Merwin, "One Story" which ends with the line, "...when there is no more story that will be our story. When there is no forest that will be our forest.