#18 BeautifulPlanet: Language of Trees
“When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with larger machines.”
- Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries From a Secret World
Everything we perceive and understand is through our eyes and existing knowledge of certain things, instead of the rest of the world.
Similarly, what we know language to be is very much based off of what we as humans interpret as communication, rather than what it truly may be. We identify sound and mobility to be key aspects of communication, however the plant kingdom bends this definition through communicating in an entirely different, secret way.
This episode is the start of a new Mind Full of Everything episode series called Beautiful Planet, where each episode discusses an aspect of our wonderful world. From key species to phenomena, this series will be a reminder of the beauty that we aren't able to access right now during lockdown but can appreciate and support nevertheless. Listen to "Language of Trees" to hear about the importance and uniqueness of communication in the plant kingdom.
Resources:
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
- Allelopathy: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0027195
- Phantom orchids: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1469-8137.2000.00592.x
- Bean plants resistant to aphid attack: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ele.12115
- Tomato plants and blight disease: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013324
- Douglas fir and paper birth experiment: https://www.nature.com/articles/41557
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