Plants Communicate Using Fungi 91
Shipud writes "In response to aphid attacks, some plants produce chemicals that repel the aphids and attract wasps, the aphids' natural enemies. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have shown that plants attacked by aphids can communicate that information to neighboring plants via existing networks of fungi in the soil. Thus fungal symbiosis with plants is shown to be taken one step further: not only do they provide nutrients to plants, they also function as communication hardware."
This topic is relevant to my interests... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody else overcome by Alpha Centauri nostaliga at the notion of large, initially hidden, fungus-based communications networks?
Also, given that we've discovered several enormous fungi (I think the largest known spreads across some 2,200 acres), I wonder if this sort of thing is actually much more common than we currently know. Ping would probably suck; but there is a lot of (fungal) fiber in the ground.
Fungi = planet brain? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's amazing to investigate fungi. In all of our space search for intelligent life, we stand on top of a living world that's far more complex than we can imagine. When we beings were evolving from very simple biology, at some point we split, and in one direction eventually became plants, and the other eventually became animals. After that split, there was another split. On that split, one direction eventually became animals, and the other direction eventually became fungi. In each split, as it were, there was a fundamental difference; each time a split occurs, one can associate one side with being more or less complex than the other side. Looking at this as one would look at a tree in nature, one can assume that each split can be represented as a node point, and at each node point, there is a stem, and a main branch that continues. Each stem represents less complexity. In our case, as humans, we split before the fungi did, so they're more advanced than humans are.
I once asked my daughter about a Venus FlyTrap, as it ate a frog. I asked, "How does the plant know to close like that, and eat the thing inside? We have brains, but how does the plant do it? Where's the plant's brain?" Her answer, "The roots are the brain". She's 6.
Re:Fungi = planet brain? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a trippy concept to think of weird plant brains living under the soil everywhere, and popping up brain pods / mushrooms in random places from their mycelium.
Then when you think about the ones that contain chemicals that allow mammals to have transcendent spiritual experiences, it makes you think about the Plant Brain / Planet Brain thing on a deeper level.