Late succession trees that lives hundreds of year have shown a lot of complex and interesting behaviors. They are able to identify offspring and send specific nutrients through the mycorrhizal network, coordinate with other trees to fight off pests, and potentially even coordinate evapotranspiration to modify weather.
One of the most interesting adaptations I've been learning about is the various adaptations that these trees and their lianas have to lightning strikes. For us they seem like rare one-off events but if you are a stationary being that lives hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, lightning strikes might be the primary driver of disturbance.
Some organisms think on really long time scales and it's hard for us to appreciate their "intelligence". If AGI does ever come around, I wonder if hyper-intelligent fast-thinking robots will one day look at humans and go "wait, there's actually a lot of intelligent behavior in these creatures that we didn't notice because they think on much different timescales"
I want more of this. Trees using coordinated cell transpiration to control the weather is so fictional but so possible. It's the kind of thing that makes Earth so cool. What do you read? Anything digestible to a curious layman with ~20 minute reading sessions on the train rides?
I can't speak to this exact scenario, but also fascinated by time scale / thinking / I am reading Greg Bears Eon at the moment. Super interesting ideas on space/time travel, not exactly related but enjoying it so thought I would share!
Oof that's hard to answer. I edit Wikipedia pages of botany-related topics so I'm usually reading stuff that's NOT 20-minute bites. I also have a particular interest in parts of nature that break the, imo, false dichotomy between "abiotic" and "biotic" (incl. aeroplankton, mycorrhizal fungal networks, aeonophiles, niche construction, soil ecological succession, etc)
Actually recently I've mostly been listening to lectures by some scientists I follow:
Evan Gora at the Cary Institute does research on big trees in tropical rainforests and recently published some fascinating work on tree adaptations to lightning strikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGFWDSXtJk or https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KjGFWDSXtJk
I'm also a big fan of Suzanne Simard's research on "mother trees". She wrote a book I've yet to read called Finding the Mother Tree that also has an audiobook available. But she also regularly does talks
A book that kicked off the popular interest in mycorrhizae is The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben which is also quite digestible. RadioLab also had a great episode about it https://radiolab.org/podcast/from-tree-to-shining-tree
And here are some of my favorite publication that sometimes cover these topics:
Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/forests-emerge-as-a-major-ove...
Noema https://www.noemamag.com/the-intelligent-forest/
Aeon https://aeon.co/essays/what-constitutes-an-individual-organi...
Emergence Magazine https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-o...
Nautilus https://nautil.us/this-cloud-forest-should-not-exist-1226267
+1 for the hidden life of trees!
Try also:
- "Anthill" by E. O. Wilson
- "The Overstory" by Richard Powers
- "Oak: The Frame of Civilization" by William Bryant Logan
- "Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees" by William Bryant Logan
- "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer