Next time you hug a tree, you might want to listen too.
According to noted Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard, trees communicate with each other in cooperative ways. And humans could learn a thing or two from them.
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And she has the experience to back it up. Simard grew up in Canadian forests as a descendant of loggers before becoming a forestry ecologist. She's now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.
She details her special connection to trees in her new memoir, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest."
As discussed in an interview with NPR, “trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain."
In proof that trees are social in nature in ways previously not fully explored, "This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest."
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She goes on to explain that trees show a way of sharing nutrients with each other, and that trees in a forest are often linked to each other via an older tree she calls a "mother" or "hub" tree.
"In connecting with all the trees of different ages, [the mother trees] can actually facilitate the growth of these understory seedlings," said Simard.
"The seedlings will link into the network of the old trees and benefit from that huge uptake resource capacity. And the old trees would also pass a little bit of carbon and nutrients and water to the little seedlings, at crucial times in their lives, that actually help them survive."
The professionally curious turned to the personally indebted when Simard contracted breast cancer. During the course of treatment she learned that one of the chemotherapy medicines she relied on was actually derived from a substance some trees make for their own mutual defense.
Simard’s incredible story started in her 20s in the late 1970s when she began working for a logging company in British Columbia. The wholesale clearing of trees shocked her, but she also found a level of excitement and challenge as she was one of the first females to work in the industry there.
Beyond our usual basic understanding of trees, Simard soon got deep into the then-new discovery for her that seemingly innocuous fungi deep under trees were actually an integral part of their growth and survival.
“Eventually,” she recalls, “I learned that these were a special kind of helper fungus called a mycorrhizal fungus — which just means that the fungus is the type that grows through the soil and picks up nutrients and water and brings it back to the seedling.”
Eventually, Simard’s connection between her own cancer and what she was learning about trees’ interaction created a sympathetic symbiosis.
“It definitely had a big influence on me,” she explains, “and my life has changed as a result, but it changed my research, too. That was when I started working with kin recognition, seeing whether or not these old trees, especially when they were dying, could recognize and help their kin.”
One of the most fascinating points in the talk centered on Simard’s understanding that, like humans, dying can be a very long process for trees. And she studied the slow effects of energy -- as carbon -- slowly burning off and entering other tree systems.
“And we found that about 40% of the carbon was transmitted through networks into their neighboring trees. The rest of the carbon would have just dispersed through natural decomposition processes ... but some of it is directed right into the neighbors. And in this way, these old trees are actually having a very direct effect on the regenerative capacity of the new forest going forward.
Loggers are quick to clear out dying trees, but Simard’s research suggests we should let them go on in their long dying process, as they pass on energy to younger trees:
“So I've been trying to tell people: Let's hold back on this salvage logging until trees have had the chance to pass on this energy and information to the new seedlings coming up.”
Check out more of this amazing conversation here.
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