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Friday, November 08, 2019

Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees

Like Jozef Imrich, Bo Slyapich seeks what no one else wants to find. . . Real and political snakes 



Rattlesnakes have had a busy year. Same for the people who catch them for a living LA Times



California Burning

The numbers that help explain why protests are rocking countries around the world WaPo

Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees - Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed – “Consider a forest: One notices the trunks, of course, and the canopy. If a few roots project artfully above the soil and fallen leaves, one notices those too, but with little thought for a matrix that may spread as deep and wide as the branches above. Fungi don’t register at all except for a sprinkling of mushrooms; those are regarded in isolation, rather than as the fruiting tips of a vast underground lattice intertwined with those roots. The world beneath the earth is as rich as the one above. For the past two decades, Suzanne Simard, a professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation at the University of British Columbia, has studied that unappreciated underworld. Her specialty is mycorrhizae: the symbiotic unions of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Beginning with landmark experiments describing how carbon flowed between paper birch and Douglas fir trees, Simard found that mycorrhizae didn’t just connect trees to the earth, but to each other as well…”