splashcat413:
headspace-hotel:
ninjaotta:
aquilacalvitium:
mycroftrh:
memeuplift:
Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.
Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.
@mycroftrh
My mum is an avid tree lover and when I told her what you wrote she practically melted and told me to thank you for teaching her :)
baby trees: mother please feed us
matriarch trees:
This is a pretty accurate breakdown of how forests work and you can read Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree to learn more about it
I remember watching a Planet Earth episode on succession in the rainforest after a great tree falls. It was all about plants competing for space and sunlight. I doubt its contents were wrong, but the level of cooperation that goes on in forests I never learned about continually amazes me.
This is getting rambly, but I’m having a train of thought, so let’s follow it.
Evolution is a process involving millions of organisms spread across time and space and any organism’s ability to personally outcompete everything around it has far less weight than the ability of everything around it that shares its genes to survive on average.
In moral philosophy, the Original Position is a thought experiment created by John Rawls asking you to design a society without knowing what role in that society you will fill. Since you might end up at the bottom of the class structure, you would be incentivized to structure things such that those at the bottom still have it pretty good.
A tree’s DNA does not know what will happen to the tree over its life. It could be the tree on the right or the tree on the left. It’s evolutionarily advantageous for trees to naturally help other trees even though that costs them some of their own nutrients because the trees that are helped put down seeds and reproduce and they’re the same tree, archetypally, the tree on the left and the tree on the right started from practically identical seeds and either is equally capable of passing on the pattern of “tree which helps other trees.”
This is not rigorous. I am not an arbologist or an evolutuonary biologist. But it’s interesting, how politically charged the idea of the survival of the fittest is, and how what fitness actually looks like in nature doesn’t really fit that narrative.
Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean “fit” like this:
It means “fit” like THIS:
Or in other words, an organism’s survival is dependent on how “fit” it is for its environment.
In the right environment, anything can be an advantage. Being strong or smart can be a detriment—a big brain and big muscles take up a lot of energy to sustain.
Furthermore, competition between two species doesn’t always (or even usually) drive one of the species to extinction. Competition drives adaptation.
If there are two species of seed-eating birds that rely on the same resources to survive, it doesn’t mean one of them will go extinct. It often means that they will both evolve more specific preferences in seeds they like to eat, and when, and where, so they don’t have to compete anymore.
This is how you get species that occupy hyperspecific niches where they only eat the leaves of one single plant, or something.
Anyway, trees:
We are discovering more and more that the classic view of nature as made of individual organisms competing for their own interests is misleading.
70-90% of all land plants form symbiotic relationships with fungi that live on their roots. In many cases, the fungal hyphae literally penetrate inside the plant cells to exchange nutrients and resources with them.
The mycorrhizal network, as it is called, links every tree in a forest. Basically every tree is linked to multiple species of fungi, and many fungi link to many species of tree. The mycorrhizal network allows nutrients and chemical signals to move between trees. Using their connection to the network, some trees can survive in completely dry soil by linking to fungi that get water by breaking down ROCKS.
And this symbiosis is OLD. It’s so old, that the earliest fossils of land plants, from 400 million years ago, are attached to seemingly identical fungi to the ones that form symbiosis with plants now.
Suzanne Simard, one of the main researchers of mycorrhizal networks, coined the term “Mother Tree” to refer to the very old trees that support young trees via the mycorrhizal network. She picked this anthropomorphic language intentionally—to challenge our understanding of trees. They communicate. They sense and respond to their environment. They engage in behaviors. And yes, one of those behaviors appears to be parental care.
You think of yourself as an individual, but you could not survive without the teeming multitudes of microbes that live in and on you. Your cells contain mitochondria that have their own DNA, relics of a time when they were their own individual organisms.
Lichens, as you probably know, are a symbiosis between at least two organisms, a fungus, an alga, and sometimes microbes of other types (I forget which). They are their own distinct organism made of multiple very different organisms working together.
It is becoming more and more helpful to view forests as enormous super-organisms with collective interests and a high level of coordination.
The fact is that trees thrive around other trees. Most tree species seriously suffer alone. It is ideal for most trees to live as part of a forest.
The very nature of a forest is far more cooperative and interconnected than the old models can do justice to. A deciduous forest redistributes a HUGE amount of nutrients every year when leaves fall to the ground. Every tree feeds the other trees. Nothing is wasted. Arguably, trees regularly engage in matriphagy. Soft, crumbly decomposing wood is an ideal substrate for sprouting young trees. When I’m in the forest and need to sample some mycelium-rich dirt, I find a large dead tree and dig right around its base. When a tree dies, the mycelium flourish right around the base of the tree; decomposers break the old tree down into rich, fertile soil.
Landscaping and lawn care forums and websites cause me pain, because the average person is so eager to wildly overwater, overfertilize, and generally over-manage their backyard in the mistaken belief that “too much competition with other plants” is the problem with every plant.
Very barren, empty environments (like overmanaged lawns) are very extreme. The term “Extremophile” is subjective and relative to human preferences, but I can make a pretty good case that dandelions, crabgrass and other plants that flourish as lawn weeds are extremophiles.
The fluctuations in temperature and moisture, extreme soil compaction, and absence of a healthy mycelium network in the soil in a manicured lawn makes conditions incredibly harsh. Most plants cannot handle being blasted from leaf to root with sunlight all day with 0 shade from other plants, and growing in soil with no other plant roots. Most plants cannot thrive without the shelter, nutrients, and cooperation that a community of plants provides.
Forests create fertile, stable environments that allow for a huge diversity of plants to grow. Every participant in the ecosystem is critical to the survival of the others. Ecosystems are so, so, so much more interconnected than popular science usually portrays.