Iirc there was recently a pop science book published by some guy who was summing up lots of fresh plant and tree research and then angling all these cool behaviors they've found in individual species as "all trees are smarter than we think" (or at least that was the angle of the market-visit to the talk show I saw the guy in - I haven't read the actual book myself).
However, even if you remove his farfetched extrapolations it still sounded line there's a lot of cool interaction between plants on a level that people generally don't expect from... Well, what most consider inanimate objects of sorts. Like parent trees (don't remember the species in question) that interconnect with their nearby off-sprouts through their roots and then pump nourishment to them through their root network. Or plants that send out chemical signals when they're to defend themselves from pests, which then other plants can sense and start the chemical warfare in advance before the pests get to them (as am example of the unrealistic extrapolations the author made be describes this as plants "talking" to each other - and while it is a form of communication, I'd say, it certainly isn't on the level of "plants actually targeting each other with information to achieve an effect or elicit a response" but more in the vein of plants being slightly aware of and able to react to what goes on in their surroundings, particularly among their own breed). So yeah, there's new research showing that plants probably so have w lot more depth to them than we expect from them, but jot on a Planet of the Trees level of awareness, brains, intelligence, sentience, or sapience.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14979439 times)