Comment by culi
4 hours ago
Late succession trees that lives hundreds of year have shown a lot of complex and interesting behaviors. They are able to identify offspring and send specific nutrients through the mycorrhizal network, coordinate with other trees to fight off pests, and potentially even coordinate evapotranspiration to modify weather.
One of the most interesting adaptations I've been learning about is the various adaptations that these trees and their lianas have to lightning strikes. For us they seem like rare one-off events but if you are a stationary being that lives hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, lightning strikes might be the primary driver of disturbance.
Some organisms think on really long time scales and it's hard for us to appreciate their "intelligence". If AGI does ever come around, I wonder if hyper-intelligent fast-thinking robots will one day look at humans and go "wait, there's actually a lot of intelligent behavior in these creatures that we didn't notice because they think on much different timescales"
I want more of this. Trees using coordinated cell transpiration to control the weather is so fictional but so possible. It's the kind of thing that makes Earth so cool. What do you read? Anything digestible to a curious layman with ~20 minute reading sessions on the train rides?