PANDEMIC DIARY

COMPETITION VS. COOPERATION
December 12, 2020

In last Sunday’s NY Times (Dec. 6) Suzanne Simard has written a marvelous article on ‘The Social Life of Forests’. Let me say at the outset, I do not wish to engage in ontological discourses and debates about sentience and what consciousness is or is not. Not at this time. I do not wish this because the forests are places of wonder where the natural world appears to take on and act with awareness. What that awareness is, is anybody’s guess.

Her theories, aggressively rejected by her community of scientists who, and this will not surprise you, was made up of elderly white men or young, ambitious white men seeking to occupy the places of the aging ones. Along comes this brilliant, curious individual, raised in Canada’s “old-growth” forests whose research took her in a direction that was about a 180 degree turn from acknowledged, accepted, and bequeathed science that she was minimally scoffed at or dismissed. But, she persisted rejecting the advise of her male peers, [“Why don’t you study growth and yield?”] believing instead “the forest was more than a collection of trees”.

Simard, over the past 40 years has gone on to change our understanding of the relationships between trees, the earth around it, and the ground beneath it. She, early on, observed that where loggers clear cut sections of forest, taking with the trees upturned soil and underbrush, the newly planted saplings and trees, with no competition and contrary to the assumption that they would thrive, were found to be more vulnerable to disease and climactic stress than the crowded old-growth trees. These saplings had open space, area to grow, and plenty of sun. Why were they so frail?

Simard turned her attention to what was happening underground. What she unearthered was buried in the soil - an underground partnership between trees and fungi known as mycorrhizas - threadlike fungi that “envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients in exchange for some of the carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis.” She further discovered that webs of root and fungi are threaded throughout forests floors which (by tracing DNA in root tips) link every tree in a forest regardless of specie.

“Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals, hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits.” Resources are observed to flow from the oldest [senior?] and largest trees to the youngest and smallest. A network of signals generated by one tree can notify other trees nearby of danger. Trees in their final stage of life bestow a substantial share of its nutrients to its healthy neighboring trees. Simard attributes these ‘behaviors’ to “perception” explaining that “trees sense nearby animals and plants and alter their behavior accordingly.” Many in the scientific community disputed her conclusions wondering why trees of different species would assist other species at their own expense - a benevolence that seemed contradictory to Darwinian evolution. This suggestion by Simard of ‘inter-specie-dependence’ stoked intense debate of old: “Is cooperation as central to evolution as competition?”

Simard sees the world as intricately bound by “infinite biological pathways” whereby species are “interdependent like yin and yang”. What was her conjecture is now fairly well accepted, that “resources travel among trees and other plants connected by mycorrhizal networks which Simard likens to the human brain. For sure, many questions remain to be investigated and substantiated, not the least of which is “why resources are exchanged in the first place especially when those trees are not closely related.” Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam suggests that although we can objectively observe how plants benefit from intricate networking, that what is missed is “the constant struggle to maximize each plant’s individual payoff.” He sees this ‘sharing’ of nutrients as complex trades and deal making, classic ‘give and take’ that includes embargoes and bribes and can lead to conflict among plants.

Nonetheless, this understanding of trees as social creatures can inform our future, not only in grasping the vitality and value of forests to humans, but also appreciating what can be learned from this knowledge and applied to our lives. Or, as Simard states, “There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.”