Skin burning, I returned to the shade and checked the wasp sting. I ought to present my women how one can make a poultice of baking soda. I sat and leaned again in opposition to the outdated tree nurturing that crescent of seedlings by the mycorrhizal community, the needles of the younger quivering in the afternoon air.
The outdated bushes have been the moms of the forest.
The hubs have been Mother Trees.
Well, mom and father bushes, since every Douglas fir tree has male pollen cones and feminine seed cones.
But … it felt like mothering to me. With the elders tending to the younger. Yes, that’s it. Mother Trees. Mother Trees join the forest.
This Mother Tree was the central hub that the saplings and seedlings nested round, with threads of various fungal species, of various colours and weights, linking them, layer upon layer, in a robust, advanced internet. I pulled out a pencil and pocket book. I made a map: Mother Trees, saplings, seedlings. Lines sketched between them. Emerging from my drawing was a sample like a neural community, like the neurons in our brains, with some nodes extra extremely linked than others.
Holy smokes.
If the mycorrhizal community is a facsimile of a neural community, the molecules shifting amongst bushes have been like neurotransmitters. The indicators between the bushes might be as sharp as the electrochemical impulses between neurons, the mind chemistry that permits us to suppose and talk. Is it doable that the bushes are as perceptive of their neighbors as we’re of our personal ideas and moods? Even extra, are the social interactions between bushes as influential on their shared actuality as that of two individuals engaged in dialog? Can bushes discern as shortly as we will?
How comparable may the mycorrhizal community actually be to a neural community? Sure, the sample of the community and the molecules transmitting from node to node by the hyperlinks may be comparable. But what about the existence of the synapse; isn’t that essential to signaling in a neural community?
Could data be transmitted throughout synapses in mycorrhizal networks, the similar approach it occurs in our brains? Amino acids, water, hormones, protection indicators, allelochemicals (poisons), and different metabolites have been already identified to cross the synapse between the fungal and plant membranes. Any molecules arriving by the use of the mycorrhizal community from one other tree may also be transmitted by the synapse.
Chemicals are launched into these synapses, and the data should then be transported alongside an electrochemical source-sink gradient from fungal-root tip to fungal-root tip, much like the workings of a nervous system. The similar primary processes, it appeared to me, have been occurring in the mycorrhizal fungal community as in our neural networks. Giving us that flash of brilliance once we resolve an issue or make an vital resolution or align {our relationships}. Maybe from each networks emerge connection, communication, and cohesion.
It was already accepted broadly that vegetation use their neural-like physiology to understand their atmosphere. Their leaves, stems, and roots sense and comprehend their environment, then alter their physiology—their progress, capability to forage for vitamins, photosynthetic charges, and closure charges of stomata for saving water. The fungal hyphae, too, understand their atmosphere and alter their structure and physiology. Like dad and mom and kids, my women and Don and me, adapting to vary, aligning to be taught new issues, determining how one can endure. I’d be dwelling tonight. Mothering.
The Latin verb intelligere means to understand or understand. Intelligence.
The mycorrhizal networks may have the signature of intelligence. At the hub of the neural community in the forest have been the Mother Trees, as central to the lives of the smaller bushes as I used to be to Hannah and Nava’s well-being.
