[crygin]

I recently learned about beech masting in NZ, which has a similar (but much more frequent) blooming cycle based on the difference between successive summer temperatures: https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/publications/newsletters/...

"According to their ‘delta T’ (ΔT) model, the likelihood of masts by several species, including beech and tussocks, is positively correlated with the difference between average summer temperatures in successive years: a high positive value of ΔT (i.e. last summer warmer than the preceding summer) corresponds to a high likelihood of a mast in the coming year."

I'd always imagined that these types of events involved pheromone-type signaling, but this is kind of a cool way to do distributed consensus based on external signaling.

[pontifier]

I saw an interesting Ted talk a few years ago about quorum sensing in bacteria.

Here's my recollection:

Essentially a single bacteria can't make you sick, and if it tried, it's so small that it would have no effect. Triggering a collective effect becomes critical for them to cause disease. Disrupting quorum sensing might be a way to fight otherwise resistant bacteria.