The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Wood Wide Web

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by Ted Lasso's Brendan Hunt, Professor of forest ecology and author of "The Mother Tree", Suzanne Simard and botanist Mark Spencer to discover how trees and plants communicate and what they are saying. Suzanne's incredible discovery that trees form a wood wide web of communication has changed our entire understanding of forests and how they work. With the help of amazing fungi, this incredible network of communication allows the trees and plants in a forest to pass information backwards and forwards to help protect themselves against predators and optimize resource. Incredibly, this could even be viewed as a form of intelligence. Brian and Robin find out how this should change the way we look at all plants, and in particular how we manage our forests and discover some of the secrets of those whispering trees.Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Professor Brian Cox, President's Medal from the Institute of Physics 2012. And I'm Robin Ince, Advanced Cycling Proficiency Badge 1987. One of the great philosophical questions is, if a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

No, it isn't. What? You just define sound correctly and the answer is yes. Oh, okay. That took me a lot less time than I imagined. You could probably be quite useful for the world of philosophy because I've been spending ages on that. I'll tell you what, I'll give you another one then. Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, again, you have to address your unspoken assumptions, don't you? You're assuming nothing is more likely than something, otherwise it's not surprising. You're right. So it's really the fault of my pessimism, isn't it? That's the, because yeah, I am very much a glass-half-empty person and what is left in the glass is frankly disgusting.

What about, is free will an illusion? Do you think I'd have worked with you for 13 years if I'd had any choice? It's a good point. And delivered with too much truth. I was hoping they might have more of a comedic way that you did that, but that really was... Penimus. Filled with bitterness.

Right. Anyway, that is the end of today's Brian Cox philosophy nodule. Nodule. Next week, we... Well, it's definitely not as much as a nodule. It's definitely only as far as a nodule. Next week, we are going to be asking what happens if you throw a book

into a black hole? That is actually what we're asking, by the way. That is what next week's show is about. And, of course, for Brian, that is merely just this kind of theoretical idea. But for me, I've already started to worry about which book it's going to be, because that's the different way that we look at the nature of cosmology.

This week's show, though, for many years, people who say that they talk to their plants have been considered to be eccentric. But what about people who say they can hear the plants talking back? Today we're talking about the wood wide web. Do plants and other species communicate with each other? And if so, what are they talking about? With us to decipher the language of the forest, we're joined by a real professor of forest ecology,

a real forensic botanist and a fictional football coach. And they are. Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, and I discovered that trees do actually talk to each other. Dr. Mark Spencer, I'm a peripatetic botanist specialising in forensics, and the thing I found out in the woods that's most exciting is the ghost orchid. In fact, I've never found it because it's one of the most extraordinary things in our woods that parasitizes fungi and nicks food from trees. Hi, my name is Brendan Hunt. I am an actor and writer and I co-created the show Ted

Lasso upon which I appear. I'm otherwise remarkably unqualified to be on this dais. which I appear I'm otherwise remarkably unqualified to be on this dais. And the best thing I found out, I found, rather, in a forest, not to reveal my urban origins, was a parking spot. It was so dark, we'd been looking for so long. That was the magic of the forest. And this is our panel. That was the magic of the forest. And this is our panel.

Before the first question, I'd just say, Brendan is definitely qualified to be here because he actually called this a dais as well, so that immediately, the elevation of what this discussion might be, you've won. But that's merely because my college job was as a stagehand, so I learned a dais and the difference, most importantly, between a podium and a lectern. This is my nomenclature. I'm into it. Suzanne, you came up

with this revolutionary idea at the time that, well, if you look at a forest, for example, then it's not a series of individual organisms, the trees and the grass and the fungi, but in some sense, it can be considered as a single individual living thing. Yeah, I mean, I grew up thinking that, and then I was told to

unlearn that, and then I went about discovering that it actually was true what I knew when I was a kid. So if that doesn't take you for a loop, I don't know what would. So the reason I got really interested in this is because where I come from, which is in Western Canada, there was a war, a war on trees. And that war was trying to get rid of the native plants. And I saw the native plants as necessary in these ecosystems, whereas the foresters were trying to get rid of them because they thought they were competing with the coveted and valuable conifer trees like the pines and the firs and so I went about learning and discovering that these trees are actually these weeds what

foresters called weeds were actually connected to the firs and the pines and that they formed this enormous web below ground like an internet you can think of it like an internet and through that internet they exchange information and resources like water and nutrients and carbon and they actually help each other out which is the complete opposite of how how these foresters were thinking and you know it's not a trivial thing that they thought that because they really, over the last half a century, have shaped forests to look like tree farms without these native plants in them so that they could grow these farms of trees, basically. So taking an old growth forest, and an old growth forest is like a wild primary forest where there there hasn't been harvesting before that are full of huge trees and basically taking them all out clear cutting them

and planting them to these little kind of like cornfields but they're you know instead of corn they're pines and weeding out these native plants and making them look like little rows of sticks really and I realized that they needed their neighbors they needed these of these weeds because they were all connected together in this below ground internet and chattering to each other constantly and helping each other out cooperating sending messages telling them hey I'm I'm your brother or I'm your sister I need some resources or I've got something extra to give and learning that this was this big cooperative network can I I'm always fascinated that you know many scientists have a kind of origin story for their fascination and I believe that your origin story of your fascination comes

basically from your dog falling into a latrine it's true yeah we had a dog jigs and jigs was a beagle and we were you know on a family vacation at well at this lake where my grandparents lived which is a rainforest and jigs was always getting into trouble and of course so was i and and speaking of pig pen pig pen was i always kind of think of myself as pig pen, because I grew up eating dirt, and having these fluffs of dirt around me all the time, and when jigs fell in the outhouse, I was like the first one up there, looking in the soil, in this, you know, this column of poop, basically, you know, and there's jigs down at the bottom, and my grandfather, and my uncle, Wilfred, and my dad, and all the uncles were there and they're digging

jigs out of this outhouse and I was just like whoo the more poop the better I loved it and I yeah I got to know soil really well at that point. Brendan it's rare for a scientist to become a cultural reference in many ways but one of the reasons that we asked you on the show is because your character in Ted Lasso references Suzanne's work directly so how did that come about yeah so it was an episode in season two late on the season and a member of the coaching staff is starting to uh desire things more individualistic than team oriented if I can go spoiler free there and um and then my character is asked about that and And the episode was written by Sasha Guerin, and she was looking for a metaphor for that moment,

and then she asked, not me, Phoebe Walsh, who is also on our staff. She plays my girlfriend Jane in the show. She's a great stand-up as well. And Phoebe Walsh is a fan of yours already. And also, the thing about our writing staff on this football show is, basically, none of them like football.

So any opportunity they can find to shoehorn something else they're interested in into the show, they come running through that portal. And so, yeah, Phoebe had immediately this description of your work in summary form. And, you know, my character is supposed to know a bunch of stuff. And I'm, you know, I'm handy on a pub trivia night. Don't get me wrong. But even just reading that couple of sentences was like, are you kidding me?

The trees work together? It's a pretty amazing concept, and it was very cool to be able to include it in the show. Well, as you said as well, it is one of those concepts that you have to keep rereading it, because it means that the moment you go into any area of countryside, it really does feel like there's a tangible change in your experience. Yeah.

And you saying in that that they used to think that trees competed with each other. I didn't know that either, so that kind of blows my mind too. What did that exactly entail in thinking? Let's talk about what was wrong. Let's talk about the wrong thinking real quick first, now that we apparently don't have that anymore. But they literally thought they were fighting for water or something? Yeah, so foresters kind of simplified the whole ecosystem

into light, water, and nutrients, and that everything needs those three things. And it's kind of like this dog-eat-dog world, or jigs-eat-jigs, or bagel-eats-bagel world. And so if a tree is shading another tree it's essentially competing for light it's that simple or if the roots can grow wide and big they're deep they're going to get all the nutrients and water for themselves and grow into big trees and the thinking was that the you know i always think the ecosystem is like a pie and you want to get the

biggest piece of pie for yourself that That's how foresters viewed ecosystems. And whereas my view of an ecosystem was there's all these plants that make the pie bigger and bigger and bigger because when they work together, they actually create more than just each one as an individual. And so that completely changes how we see ecosystems. Instead of competing for a piece of pie that's only going to be so big, it's like let's actually create something that's a bigger pie. That's what they do when they cooperate.

I think, for me as a fellow scientist and not a specialist in your field, there are several incredibly important things in what you've just said and in the work that your community of scientists have done. And I think, for me, first off, off was your experience to talk about mud you know that's my own experience of childhood grappling with mud and dirt and grime and I think we are in a point in our society at the moment where we're terrified of grime we isolate ourselves from it and we we we view the soil as dangerous which i think is catastrophic for us as individuals and culturally and also you know we talk about your science in this kind of in almost a sort of field laboratory

way but there's this incredibly important and powerful message in the work of your community is which is about a huge fundamental shift in how we perceive plants plants make up 60 percent of the biomass of this planet they rule but it's more than just them being big and out there all the time the fact that they communicate and share resources means that we should shift our comprehension about plants and there are questions about sentience what they, the meaning of what they're about. And so it's an incredibly important philosophical question for how we relate to plants themselves, but also how we address really, really challenging and terrifying questions on our planet at the moment. So this work is extraordinary in terms of how we view plants, but it's potentially

groundbreaking in how we can actually deal with some of the challenges in the future. Can I just say, though, Mark, I'm glad that we got a bit of your origin story there with you digging around in the mud, because I was thinking, right, so your dog fell in the latrine, you became an ecologist, and then you became a forensic botanist, which is your dog fell in the latrine and didn't survive. Well, I did nearly kill the cat with a mud pie. We're going to come back to that. Or we can have it now. A cat with a mud pie. We're going to come back to that.

Or we can have it now. A cat with a mud pie. I accidentally poisoned our lovely tabby cat, Tiger Smooth. See, accidental from a forensic botanist. I see everything as research. I'm not sure. I made this mud pie. I was kind of in detention because I'd been naughty at home

and I was in the back garden. Because you poisoned some other children. So I poisoned the cat by accident. I collected all these berries and sort of made it into a weird mud pie for my own entertainment. And then a few hours later I noticed

the cat rigorously vomiting in the corner having eaten some of it. So I think it was a mixture of the cat's stupidity and me being overly excitable. Brendan, I'm going to go to you now. So as the jury, I accidentally collected some berries. What do you think? Guilty or not guilty?

100% guilty, and that's why he's in the field he's in now. It's to try to find all the data around a crime scene, a geological crime scene, if I have my terms right. And what's the word when you find someone innocent? It's not abdicate, it's absolve. Absolve. He's absolving himself. But it's the correct word. It is a crime. A word the cat wasn't impressed, definitely.

Well, like many physicists as well. Always putting those darn cats in those boxes. Sorry, we've somehow moved away from the trees talking, which I think might also be because I keep getting Clint Eastwood in my head now because there's that song, I talk to the trees and they don't listen to me, from Paint Your Wagon, terrible B-side. But anyway, let's... Does anyone get that reference, a B-side?

Yes, someone over there. Paint Your Wagon was a very successful film from the late 1960s. Oh, yeah, he might understand the secrets of the universe, but when it comes to show tunes of the late 60s, no, no, no, no, no. I think you'll find only one of us on this panel has won Celebrity Mastermind. Anyway... APPLAUSE

Give us a line. Come on. Give us a line of the song. It's great, right? So Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood, I will do him... He sings it. He sings it. He sings it. And he's not got a great voice.

He goes, I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me. I'm not familiar. Don't look at me. I do look at you. And when he says I'm not familiar, that's a really all-encompassing I'm not familiar. He's saying he's rejecting you, Brian. Should I just take over? No, I'll be fine.

Suzanne, I'm fascinated to know, how do trees communicate? In English and French. familiar he's saying he's rejecting you brian should i just take her no i'll be fine suzanne i'm fascinated to know how do trees communicate in english and french and when a canadian knows how to keep the audience on their side just in case that those are the two uh national languages of can, so that's what they know. They communicate in resources, water, nutrients, and carbon. So think of that like a language. If you think of carbon, photosynthate is a bunch of six carbon molecules hooked to six oxygen molecules hooked to, I think, eight hydrogen molecules.

And that's like a word, right? It's a compound. And then there's a whole bunch of other compounds, a bunch of amino acids, which are other words in the language. So you can think of the language of carbon. And then nitrogen, there's different amino acids like glutamate and alanine. And, you know, there's other ones too. I just can't remember what they are right now and and so that's the language of amino acids and then water is just water and things are dissolved in water that's another part of the language and then there's a whole other stream of words it's just about information so i'm just using these metaphors of words and language because

basically they're communicating with the things that they need and some of the other information they communicate is about their relationship with each other for example do you want to marry me coach beard we've only just met and i'm not saying no it's very forward of me it's true or you, if you're my brother or if you're my sister. Well, sidebar then, when they communicate that with each other, do they say, I think you might be my brother because I've recently been on a genealogy website called Ancestry.com? I know their finger, their leaves are all over the fingerprints no that doesn't make sense is this communication though are they just reacting to you know concentrations of various molecules and so on as you said that water or is it can it be defined as real communication it's real communication because one that's talking to the

other one, it's a back and forth conversation. So it goes back and forth. And then the tree or the plant that is sending the communication, there's a response of the receiver. And then the communicator, the donor, we call them, also changes its behavior according to the messages that are going back and forth. So there's an actual receipt of information and then a conveyance back again and a change in behaviour. So, yeah, it's not just a transmission of resources. It's actually this conversation going on that changes how they behave. Is this only between single species or is it a communication across species? No, all across species.

And they communicate through these, as I said, these fungal networks. across species and they communicate through these as i said these fungal networks so all of the plants in england and the uk and where i'm from in canada they've all almost all plants form these mycorrhizas and mycorrhizas is a symbiosis between the plant and the fungus they they can't survive without joining in this this togetherness and so when you're in the forest and you see all those herbs in the understory, they're all linked together in this network. And you see the oak trees, they're all linked together in a separate network. And you can even have networks

that are linking different species together. So the oaks and the firs and the pines are all linked together. I think that idea of communication, again, we tend to think of you know plants diversity and then oh we hear the word fungi and then but actually within the fungal network in there there are dozens and dozens of species actually participating in these communication systems and supplementary and auxiliary to that you've got bacterial communities which are affecting

the fungal populations so you've got incredible complexity which is about nutrient sharing about diversity of organisms but also sharing other pieces of information not just right i'm hungry give me some food um but things like you know there's a predator about watch out you know there's grazing pressure or there's a pathogenic bacteria in the environment and we need to actually shift our protective chemicals to ensure that we don't die and all these kind of things so the complexity of the plant communications and the complexity of the fungal and bacterial communication is absolutely extraordinary this isn't a kind of sort of ping ping ping of information it's a huge burst of biological chemical signaling passing billions and billions of pieces of data across these organisms and for people who are listening and find it sort of a

almost fantastical you'd said to me earlier actually if someone had said this to you as a professional a couple of decades ago i would have laughed frankly i think i probably would have laughed probably rolled my eyes the idea that you know whispering grass the trees don't need to know i've been waiting to do that um that they that actually that complexity and communication they you'd rolled your eyes you know most biologists the idea that plants had con well not concepts but recognized kinship and were sharing resources and communicating is something that would have been absolutely extraordinary within the biological community 30 40 years ago it's extraordinary to

you now but that extraordinariness is also immensely important So when you were over here laughing 30 years ago, I was over there being laughed at. Because I was the one that was doing that crazy stuff. No, that's okay. I knew it was you all along. Well, that's an interesting... By the way, Brendan, just so you know, it's your turn next to do the song based around a plant.

Great, I'll be ready. Yeah, just as Mark was saying there, you had to really fight for this idea, didn't you? When I first read your story, it reminded me of Jane Goodall coming back from Gombe and fighting with all the information that she'd found out about chimpanzees, communities, and it must have been very, very difficult.

Yeah, it was. That's why I'm kind of weird now. The trouble is you're on this show and the kind of weird. We only like the weird. And we have Brian as a kind of, you know, control. We've got such a profound belief that Pile of Lance are passive in our society and they're not. They're dynamic and aggressive.

They attack each other if, you know, they're fighting for resources or, you know, they're competing. But, you know, they warn each other if they're fighting for resources or they're competing. But they warn each other. Many studies have shown how if a deer comes into a wood and starts grazing, the plant will actually feel the impact of the grazing. It will affect its physiology and it will produce chemicals that are warning signals which get passed to other plants in the community that warning signal enables the other plants in that community to ramp up their toxins so when

the deer moves to another location to have another snack the plant is unpalatable it's grazed less and the deer moves on so the plants are actually profoundly regulating the behavior of the deer not the other way around um i have a good question about these messages um so they send each other warnings do they ever send each other just like compliments hey larry larry the elm tree you today, buddy. Keep doing what you're doing. Kind of. Ooh! Yeah.

Like, if you were my sibling, for example, and I knew you were my sibling, because I can detect through these chemical messages that you're my sibling, what we're finding is that they'll send more carbon, more water, and my sibling will create bigger networks, they'll take up more nutrients, and they'll be like, hey, I'm doing better. More confidence to generally carrying themselves better as a tree.

That's great. That's how it should be. There's a bright golden haze on the meadow. There's a bright golden haze on the meadow. Yes. Also, exactly the right length for us not to have to pay copyright, so that is the act of the film. You were saying before about a lot of the writers for Ted Lasso, they're not really into football. And I think there's that interesting, which it doesn't matter,

because Ted Lasso is great. It's the story. It is the human story. And this, to me, is one of the things which seems to be so important with what Mark's talking about with Suzanne's work, which is these things that we can now... Suddenly you look at woodland, suddenly you look at the ground beneath it, and there is a story going on.

And I think, you know, I just wondered as a writer, finding that story to sometimes deliver an idea which people may not think that they were actually interested in in the first place. Yeah, I mean yeah i mean also like a thing that we're getting at in these stories on the show is that you know we're all we're all kind of the same and we're all together uh more than we think you know more and certainly more together than we are apart and so to find out about you know whole forest working together and being one organism is is is pretty pretty perfect frankly but i'm

kind of the wrong guy to ask because i'm the guy in the writer's room who loves the football and i think the uh all the lovey-dovey stuff is garbage give me scores and goals uh no what about the dart scene that's one of the i'm a big darts fan it's one of the strongest dart scene i've seen on television well i can tell you this um i was not there that day and but jason rewrote that whole speech the night before and then put it in the show. And it's a whole thing where he refers to a phrase accredited to Walt Whitman, but is probably not him, called be curious, not judgmental. But I will say that Jason and I became darts fans at the same time when we were living in Amsterdam and the only English language programs

that were available on Dutch television were darts-related, and so our favorite words to say to each other, and we would pretty much say this like hello or even aloha. It had so many different meanings, but, you know, walk into a room, there's Jason. 180! 180! So, we love darts. There is something fantastic about being in Amsterdam and watching the Barnsley Metrodome, which is one of the great venues. I'm kind of intrigued.

As a writer, do you find there's sometimes you think, how am I... I've got something that you love. It might not be football, whatever the idea, and you think, I want to turn this into something which people didn't realise they wanted to know more about. Yeah, and actually football's a big part of it because I don don't know if you've heard but in america they don't care for it so much and um uh but i you know largely by dint of having lived in europe for a spell like i think it's great you know i i was not really exposed to it at all as a kid and i found

out living there you know already a sports fan sure but not a football fan at all and finding out like no it's it's actually great and part of what's great about it is there's so many stories and so much drama and history. And every match these two clubs play, and I think more so than for old baseball teams, are informed by stuff that happened 50 years ago because the people in the stands remember the thing that happened 50 years ago and they are still angry about it.

That's a beautifully answered, before you came on when Robin said he has those questions where his brain starts off somewhere in this case the subject of the show and wanders off through three different things and ends up asking something that's unintelligible.

To be fair, I was trying to be fair. I was trying to be fair to be able to answer that because I had no idea what he'd asked. But you did a great job. Fantastic. Don't do that, Brian, because it means that then I ask the non-expert guests really lengthy questions about the nature of fungus. Given that Robin has just about brought us back

by mentioning the word fungus, I thought I would ask about the role of fungi, because this communication isn't that you alluded to it is not necessarily or even slightly direct between the trees let's say fungi are involved at a fundamental level absolutely so fungi the kingdom fungi there are millions of species so the fungal diversity is enormous a typical oak tree in a woodland in southern England probably could have, if the woodland is old, is ancient and healthy, could have dozens of species of these associated fungi with it. If you go to a new planted woodland that's just

been plonked on the British landscape by HS2, you will probably find the fungal associates with those trees are probably in the twos or threes. So there is massive complexity in ancientness in fungal communities. Before we came on, you were talking about something primary woodland. So there's an idea in this country, and it's slightly different because woodland history is different all around the world, of primary forest woodland that has not been cut down, although it can be critiqued now when we increasingly understand more about woodland

and forest history around the world but in general there is this idea in in england that we've got one tiny piece of woodland left that has never been felled it's called wistman's wood in devon and it's about the size of a postage stamp there are probably a few other tiny scraps but most of our ancient woodlands as we refer to them our woodlands have been profoundly managed over the last 5,000 years or so by human beings in this country and over much of Europe and frankly other parts of the world and we tend to refer to those as ancient and those are the kind of woodlands we need to protect not planting plantations. Suzanne what would happen if you've got an older woodland and you've got this network underneath if you then replanted a tree you brought

it from somewhere else what do we know about how that communication starts or is there initially I mean is is there a rejection of something which is then placed in the same way you know if something is grafted in that is alien you know one of the most common things that an ecologist says is it depends it depends on the context but if you're in england and you're in a a moor that's been there for thousands of years and the woodland has been you know taken off thousands of years ago, the whole soil microbial community has changed. And so the mycorrhizae, the fungi and the bacteria and all the soil food web, all the organisms in that soil food web will have changed.

So if you try to put an oak tree back in a grassland or a meadow that's been there for thousands of years, they're not going to have the mycorrhizas that they need. And so it's really hard to re-establish, to bring back trees into a whole soil that's been changed. And so often what you have to do is bring those fungi and that whole, or sorry, fungi. You British say fungi, we say fungi.

We're the odd ones out, I think, probably globally. Again. There's a song in out, I think, probably globally. Again. There's a song in this somewhere. Yeah, I know. I'm not going to sing. So we bring soil with the plants sometimes, or bring inoculum and then reintroduce them. And then they start out really simply, but they do connect in time. They will connect with their neighbours if there's compatible neighbours nearby. It almost reminds me of when we think of termite colonies or ant colonies. There's not a great deal of suggestion that the individuals themselves are particularly intelligent. But they exhibit this collective behavior, this emergent behavior, which looks intelligent. When you see termite man, they're air conditioned and they're quite

remarkable structures yeah so is there a similarity here there is and you know um so the whole idea of intelligence is kind of fraught with you know human expectations but let's put that aside for a minute and and when i look at these networks in our ancient forests in Canada, and these are primary forests, so call hubs, and smaller nodes, satellite nodes, and they're linked together. And you can think of it like, you know, the airport system, for example, where Heathrow is a hub, and then all the little towns around it are little nodes, and they're linked together by the flights that go back and forth. And you start, out of that emerges this complex pattern that's a biological neural network. And so then you start to think, well, does it behave like a brain? It turns out that some of those compounds that move through those networks, from airport to airport, if you will, or tree to tree, are actually

neurotransmitters. There's actually glutamate is the main compound that moves from tree to tree, and that is one of our neurotransmitters and so now we've got the structure of a brain below ground and we also have the chemicals moving from tree to tree that are the same as our neurotransmitters and it emerges out of it intelligent behavior which is the regenerative aspects of a forest and so to me of those things add up together to an intelligent system. Brendan, this is an astonishing idea, isn't it? It is. And it reminded me of another book I read that kind of talked about this, which is a book by a guy named Michael Pollan, and it's called How to Change Your Mind. And it brings us back to the question of both fungi and fungi. At one point, did mushrooms say,

oh, hey, there's some humans coming, they're going to eat us. If they do, let's make them trip. When did that happen? Because that might be evolutionary as well. It's chance. There's no evidence that the toxins in fungi, for example, or the interesting compounds that are found in some of the fungi which cause human beings to hallucinate are there to do those

things in us it just so happens that when we eat certain types of mushroom we go off our heads um not because of any kind of evolutionary thing have you read the sacred mushroom and the cross any kind of evolutionary thing. Have you read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross? That's a good one. Are there two books? No, no, it's just one. It can be.

No, that's the whole thing about this guy had this theory that this is where religion came from, that communion was originally that you would be given a mushroom and then you would see God. Stuff like that is in this Michael Pollan book, for sure. And talking about how the neural networks of mushrooms are kind of like the neural networks in our brain. And it just goes a long way toward, I don't know, justifying what I was doing in college and legitimizing a lot of otherwise infantile behaviour. So if you've got that on your conscience,

I really recommend this book. Michael Pollan, get into it. So this is great. So he's found a way of justifying trying to kill the cat. You've found a way of wasting the three or four years when you were tripping off your head. Try seven. It's all research. To be honest, do you really know?

And I just want... We've run out of time, but i just want to pick up something you said right back at the start which you mentioned the the philosophy word but you said that we are um these ecosystems these organisms these forests are complex and you kind of i think we're suggesting that the sometimes the way we think about animals and the way we think about plants is different because we kind of think of animals as somehow, I don't know, sentient or whatever it is, and plants are just things that grow. And you sort of suggested that we should perhaps begin to change our view.

Well, it's fair to say being a botanist, I'm always going to be somewhat partisan on this view. But yes, I mean, we've seen revolutions in our perspective around animal sentience. I mean we've seen revolutions in our perspective around animal sentience I believe this kind of research shows that we need a revolution around how we perceive plants and I think it is incredibly important and also I've completely forgotten what the question was my brain went blank what Brian was trying to say is are we saying has it changed from throwing a stick for a dog are we now talking about it changed from throwing a stick for a dog? Are we now talking about throwing a dog for a stick? That was roughly what you were saying. You don't seem to care about poisoning a cat, but should you care about...

Oh, come on, be fair, there was definitely some, at least, semblance of regret. Maybe Susanna, I'd ask you that question. How complex should we perceive these systems to be? Very much, right? We should be thinking of these creatures, the plants, the trees, the bugs, as our kin. You know, we've evolved from the same soup, basically. We share 25% of our genes with trees.

They're our kin. And in fact, a lot of the communities, the native communities in Canada call trees the tree people and the salmon people and the wolf people, like their own brothers and sisters, and treat them and care for them the same way. And if we can start doing that as a global community, we'll be so much better off because we'll have healthy ecosystems that will bring the earth back in balance so it is it's absolutely crucial that we change the way we see nature in the environment i'm just going to finish momentarily with a really weird random piece of information is that one small group of

flowering plants have done something really weird and they've divested themselves of this relationship and that's members of the cabbage family they are not mycorrhizal we've found no evidence of it so cabbages just went nah not doing that and they've ditched this relationship which is most peculiar so we shouldn't feel bad about eating cabbage so you're not going to be eating as far as we know any mycorrhizal associates but there are probably endophytes as we call them lurking in the foliage doing other strange things so that's the end message for the show kill the cabbages those turncoats um we've got we there are more we haven't uh quite finished with you yet there will be more

questions but we do also ask the audience a question as well uh every show and today we asked the audience if you could talk to trees what do you think they would say to you i've got from a john dredge i'm several thousand years old and not once has anyone remembered my birthday yeah the other trees we've made the case that perhaps the forest remembers uh tom and zoe uh come with uh stop cutting us down you're making us unsappy that perhaps the forest remembers, haven't we? Tom and Zoe come up with, stop cutting us down, you're making us unsappy. I got this one, though. Stray Moose 101, who said, it's a relief to find someone new to talk to.

That's more my level. I've got, don't even think about touching my plums. See, now we've moved on to the area where everyone's comfortable. Is a plum a tree? It's a tree, isn't it? Yeah, it's a plum tree, isn't it? What are you looking at me for? Brian has told me off for not asking you the expert questions, and now you're the plum guy.

Oh, no, don't say that. That's terrible. This is from Steve. I'd ask them about their favourite branch of mathematics and hope they'd say geometry. We decided it was such a good question, to finish, we'd ask the panel. So the question was, if you could talk to the trees or mushrooms,

what would you ask? So why don't we finish with that? So why don't I start with you? If you could talk to the trees, what would you ask? What do you think of us as humans? And what would you, how do you,

would you like us to help you out? I mean, my default question when I meet someone is, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? I can't best Suzanne's answer, actually. I think absolutely. It's so important. What kind of tree, though, is the answer you're looking for? So that's your opening date line what are you hoping for um i guess a sex tree this scenario

fertility fertility plums you know the whole thing that's where i wanted it to go and i'm glad because i think they were both very sage points that were made but at the same time i also felt that we needed some kind of moment just to really plumb the depths after everything else so that's uh if it says sage point and plumb the depths oh my god this is event i'll tell you what i wish i had a brain that worked as well as actually basically the soil of a woodland floor because this one is all over the shop the uh my neural connections are barely that of a group of termites could we introduce some fungal networks into brain well fungi do that already um and well for example you know the infamous Ophiocordyceps, the zombie fungus, which the spores get into the body of its host, eat inside the host, overtake its physiology,

and command, in advertent commons, the poor benighted insect to climb to the top of a stem, where the fungus then kills its prey and then bursts out of its head and releases spores into the air to spread its life around. So, yeah, fungi are already doing that. There's a lot of evidence that fungi do actually control the physiology of their hosts. But we shouldn't do that to Robin, then.

Robin, what do you think? I'm not great on heights. I'm not saying... In physical education, I never got far up the rope so there's a possibility my spores are just going to end up all over you Brian and one of your Italian jackets so thank you very much

to our panel Suzanne Simard Mark Spencer and Brendan Hunt next week we are finally back to cosmology I cannot believe, in fact, that we've done three shows in a row which have basically been about biology and I don't know how we've managed to get away with that. Well, we did talk about the entropy of a bat.

Not in the edit, we didn't. That did not make it. In Oceans, we talked about the polar nature of water molecules. Yeah, again, not in the edit. It never makes it through. This is one of the reasons we're glad you don't listen to the show. Because you have no idea how the fact we're always cutting out the physics next week though i win because we are talking about one of the most important ideas in theoretical physics which is the black hole information paradox if a black hole forms in a pure quantum state does it evolve through the

emission of hawking radiation into a mixed state that won't be making the edit we'll see you again in a fortnight that's what's going to happen. Goodbye. Goodbye. Turn that nice again. Hi, I'm Russell Cain, and I want to tell you about my podcast Turned out nice again. infuriating, wonderful, enlightening listens you can have. Why? Because we take people from history you thought you had the facts about and let off fact bombs around them. If you think you know everything about Prince, Elizabeth I, Freud, Frida Kahlo, Allen Ginsberg, you don't. If you want to hear uncomfortable comedians squirming in their seats when they're forced to make a vote one way or the other, evil or genius,

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