[filoeleven]

Yeah, it’s wild stuff. The linked Radiolab episode below discusses (among other fascinating things) how fungi are responding to climate change by choosing to trade more with trees that are better suited to the new climate; I’m guessing that they get a “better deal” from those trees. Fungi farm forests.

I don’t remember if it’s in that episode or if I read it somewhere else, but fungi will also help parent trees to preferentially provide nutrients to their offspring over other trees of the same species. Perhaps that uses the same mechanism: “this tree tastes a lot like that one, let’s pool their resources.”

The more I learn about forests, the more I see them as superorganisms. I guess that’s what an ecosystem is; it’s just getting harder and harder for me to differentiate a cell vs a plant vs an animal vs an ecosystem in many ways—scale being the main difference, and complexity quite close to it. But that perceived complexity could be an artifact of my perspective as a conscious participant at the scale in which I live, and my familiarity with “what behaviors matter to humans and organisms more like humans.”

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/from-...