Don't interrupt. We are the principals of Accurate Building Inspectors of Brooklyn, New York. Like, I say, it's early in the season. ROBERT: That is actually a clue in what turns out to be a deep, deep mystery. He was a -- what was he? But we are in the home inspection business. So there is some water outside of the pipe. JAD: Is it just pulling it from the soil? And if you don't have one, by default you can't do much in general. Her use of metaphor. And I'm wondering whether Monica is gonna run into, as she tries to make plants more animal-like, whether she's just going to run into this malice from the scientific -- I'm just wondering, do you share any of that? And again. So you are related and you're both in the plumbing business? JENNIFER FRAZER: And he would repeat this. ROBERT: And the idea was, she wanted to know like, once the radioactive particles were in the tree, what happens next? So I don't have an issue with that. Artificial Plants Aquarium Substrate Backgrounds Gravel, Sand & Stones Live Plants Ornaments Plant Food & Fertilizers Heating & Lighting Heaters Hoods & Glass Canopies Heating & Lighting Accessories Lights Live Fish Goldfish, Betta & More Starter Kits bird Bird Shops Food & Treats Pet Bird Food Treats Then he would bring them the meat and he would ring a bell. It's as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest. No. JENNIFER FRAZER: And then they did experiments with the same fungus that I'm telling you about that was capturing the springtails, and they hooked it up to a tree. Listen to Radiolab: "Smarty Plants" on Pandora - Do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. What's its job? I spoke to her with our producer Latif Nasser, and she told us that this -- this network has developed a kind of -- a nice, punny sort of name. Then we actually had to run four months of trials to make sure that, you know, that what we were seeing was not one pea doing it or two peas, but it was actually a majority. MONICA GAGLIANO: Like a defensive mechanism. Plants are complex and ancient organisms. ROBERT: So the plants are now, you know, buckled in, minding their own business. The problem is is with plants. She went into the forest, got some trees. I mean, this is going places. We went and looked for ourselves. SUZANNE SIMARD: It's just this incredible communications network that, you know, people had no idea about in the past, because we couldn't -- didn't know how to look. I remember going in at the uni on a Sunday afternoon. You have a forest, you have mushrooms. Just the sound of it? ROBERT: So you can -- you can see this is like a game of telephone. So otherwise they can't photosynthesize. ROBERT: And then those little tubes will wrap themselves into place. I'm a research associate professor at the University of Sydney. MONICA GAGLIANO: Exactly. And they still remembered. She took some plants, put them in a pot that restricted the roots so they could only go in one of just two directions, toward the water pipe or away from the water pipe. Maybe each root is -- is like a little ear for the plant. She's a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia. Smarty Plants--My Latest Guest Spot for Radiolab - Scientific American Blog Network COVID Health Mind & Brain Environment Technology Space & Physics Video Podcasts Opinion Store Knowledge within. No, it's far more exciting than that. You got somewhere to go? If a plant doesn't have a brain what is choosing where to go? So -- so carbon will move from that dying tree. Because after dropping them 60 times, she then shook them left to right and they instantly folded up again. They're father and son. Oh, yeah. She's working in the timber industry at the time. She says we now know that trees give each other loans. They may have this intelligence, maybe we're just not smart enough yet to figure it out. ROBERT: That is actually a clue in what turns out to be a deep, deep mystery. JENNIFER FRAZER: But no, they're all linked to each other! JAD: So today we have a triptych of experiments about plants. ROBERT: So she takes the plants, she puts them into the parachute drop, she drops them. In 1997, a couple of scientists wrote a paper which describes how fungi JENNIFER FRAZER: Have developed a system for mining. And we can move it up, and we can drop it. A tree needs something else. The fungi, you know, after it's rained and snowed and the carcass has seeped down into the soil a bit, the fungi then go and they drink the salmon carcass down and then send it off to the tree. Liquid rocks. ANNIE MCEWEN: What was your reaction when you saw this happen? There's -- on the science side, there's a real suspicion of anything that's anthropomorphizing a plant. No, no, no, no, no. I was like, "Oh, my God! Are going to make me rethink my stance on plants. Fan, light, lean. JENNIFER FRAZER: The whole thing immediately closes up and makes it look like, "Oh, there's no plant here. Me first. Start of message. Annie McWen or McEwen ], [JENNIFER FRAZER: Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack ], [ALVIN UBELL: Pat Walter and Molly Webber. That's a parade I'll show up for. Like the bell for the dog. They play with sound and story in a way that's incredibly intriguing, I was instantly hooked with More Perfect. She says it was like this moment where she realizes, "Oh, my God! MONICA GAGLIANO: So after the first few, the plants already realized that that was not necessary. It's a -- it's a three-pronged answer. Today, Robert drags Jad along on a parade for the surprising feats of brainless plants. Well of course, there could be a whole -- any number of reasons why, you know, one tree's affected by another. Or at the time actually, she was a very little girl who loved the outdoors. [laughs]. Wait a second. Picasso! So she's saying they remembered for almost a month? They definitely don't have a brain. It's condensation. This peculiar plant has a -- has a surprising little skill. ROBERT: Could a plant learn to associate something totally random like a bell with something it wanted, like food? She's not gonna use hot water because you don't want to cook your plants, you know? You got the plant to associate the fan with food. ], And Alvin Ubell. Smarty Plants. ROBERT: And while it took us a while to see it, apparently these little threads in the soil. ROBERT: And with these two stimuli, she put the plants, the little pea plants through a kind of training regime. And then Monica would Just about, you know, seven or eight inches. Wait a second. I guess you could call it a mimosa plant drop box. Whatever. LARRY UBELL: That -- that would be an interesting ALVIN UBELL: Don't interrupt. And I remember it was Sunday, because I started screaming in my lab. ROBERT: So here's what she did. So we figured look, if it's this easy and this matter of fact, we should be able to do this ourselves and see it for ourselves. I don't know. Like, from the trees perspective, how much of their sugar are they giving to the fungus? ROBERT: To try to calculate how much springtail nitrogen is traveling back to the tree. So you are related and you're both in the plumbing business? ROBERT: No. ROBERT: So you are related and you're both in the plumbing business? LARRY UBELL: All right, my hypothesis is that what happens is LARRY UBELL: Can I -- can I have a few minutes? "I'm under attack!". [laughs]. I thought okay, so this is just stupid. Because what she does next is three days later, she takes these plants back into the lab. They're all out in the forest. I'm 84. And after not a whole lot of drops the plant, she noticed, stopped closing its leaves. JENNIFER FRAZER: The whole thing immediately closes up and makes it look like, "Oh, there's no plant here. She's not gonna use hot water because you don't want to cook your plants, you know? JENNIFER FRAZER: It is! And why would -- why would the fungi want to make this network? And so on. So you're like a metaphor cop with a melty heart. ROBERT: They would salivate and then eat the meat. This is the headphones? Unfortunately, right at that point Suzanne basically ran off to another meeting. But it didn't happen. ROBERT: So she takes the plants, she puts them into the parachute drop, she drops them. Now the plants if they were truly dumb they'd go 50/50. One time, the plant literally flew out of the pot and upended with roots exposed. Robert, I have -- you know what? Pretty much like the concept of Pavlov with his dog applied. Both aiming at the pea plant from the same direction, and the pea plant leans toward them. MONICA GAGLIANO: So, you know, I'm in the dark. Picasso! I don't think Monica knows the answer to that, but she does believe that, you know, that we humans We are a little obsessed with the brain. If you have this kind of license, then you are only allowed to grow up to that certain height; if . MONICA GAGLIANO: Exactly, which is pretty amazing. Couple minutes go by And all of a sudden we could hear this barking and yelping. Are you, like, aggressively looking around for -- like, do you wake up in the morning saying, "Now what can I get a plant to do that reminds me of my dog, or reminds me of a bear, or reminds me of a bee?". It was like, "Oh, I might disturb my plants!" Why waste hot water? LINCOLN TAIZ: I think you can be open-minded but still objective. We dropped. So if all a tree could do was split air to get carbon, you'd have a tree the size of a tulip. So it's predicting something to arrive. SUZANNE SIMARD: And so I designed this experiment to figure that out. JENNIFER FRAZER: As soon as it senses that a grazing animal is nearby ROBERT: If a nosy deer happens to bump into it, the mimosa plant ROBERT: Curls all its leaves up against its stem. On our knees with our noses in the ground, and we can't see anything. ROBERT: So it's not that it couldn't fold up, it's just that during the dropping, it learned that it didn't need to. So she decided to conduct her experiment. So it wasn't touching the dirt at all. So we've done experiments, and other people in different labs around the world, they've been able to figure out that if a tree's injured ROBERT: It'll cry out in a kind of chemical way. ALVIN UBELL: How much longer? And we were all like, "Oh, my goodness! And while it took us a while to see it, apparently these little threads in the soil. ROBERT: It turns that carbon into sugar, which it uses to make its trunk and its branches, anything thick you see on a tree is just basically air made into stuff. Favorite 46 Add to Repost 7. LATIF: It's like Snow White and The Seven Tubes or something. ROBERT: And they're digging and digging and digging. I wonder if that was maybe a bit too much. SUZANNE SIMARD: They can't photosynthesize. So for three days, three times a day, she would shine these little blue lights on the plants. Yours is back of your house, but let's make it in the front. On the outside of the pipe. JENNIFER FRAZER: I am the blogger of The Artful Amoeba at Scientific American. This is by the way, what her entire family had done, her dad and her grandparents. So you can -- you can see this is like a game of telephone. I think that's fair. We dropped. I mean, it's a kind of romanticism, I think. And so why is that? Maybe not with the helmet, but yeah. He's holding his hand maybe a foot off the ground. And lignin is full of nitrogen, but also compounds like nitrogen is important in DNA, right? JENNIFER FRAZER: Anyone who's ever had a plant in a window knows that. LINCOLN TAIZ: I think you can be open-minded but still objective. Yeah, plants really like light, you know? Or maybe slower? Today, Robert drags Jad along on a parade for the surprising feats of brainless plants. And so we, you know, we've identified these as kind of like hubs in the network. It's like Snow White and The Seven Tubes or something. They all went closed. ROBERT: And then later, scientists finally looked at these things under much more powerful microscopes, and realized the threads weren't threads, really. Now the plants if they were truly dumb, they'd go 50/50. So what do we have in our ears that we use to hear sound? So light is -- if you shine light on a plant you're, like, feeding it? JAD: Wait a second. She's done three experiments, and I think if I tell you about what she has done, you -- even you -- will be provoked into thinking that plants can do stuff you didn't imagine, dream they could do. She thinks that they somehow remembered all those drops and it never hurt, so they didn't fold up any more. And what a tree needs are minerals. Okay? Because after dropping them 60 times, she then shook them left to right and they instantly folded up again. An expert. ROBERT: So what they're saying is even if she's totally sealed the pipe so there's no leak at all, the difference in temperature will create some condensation on the outside. I mean, you've heard that. ROBERT: So after much trial and error with click and hums and buzzes MONICA GAGLIANO: All sorts of randomness. Of Accurate Building Inspectors. ROBERT: And Monica wondered in the plant's case MONICA GAGLIANO: If there was only the fan, would the plant ROBERT: Anticipate the light and lean toward it? JENNIFER FRAZER: And his idea was to see if he could condition these dogs to associate that food would be coming from the sound of a bell. ROBERT: So if a beetle were to invade the forest, the trees tell the next tree over, "Here come the --" like Paul Revere, sort of? And again. But white, translucent and hairy, sort of. AATISH BHATIA: So this is our plant dropper. So they can't move. She says what will happen under the ground is that the fungal tubes will stretch up toward the tree roots, and then they'll tell the tree With their chemical language. Jad and Robert, theyare split on this one. ROBERT: Okay. Like a human would. And it's that little, little bit of moisture that the plant will somehow sense. And might as well start the story back when she was a little girl. ROBERT: And it's in that little space between them that they make the exchange. Yeah. And, you know, my job was to track how these new plantations would grow. It's okay. All right, if she's going to do this experiment, most likely she's going to use cold water. So let's go to the first. -- they spring way up high in the air. Like what she saw in the outhouse? Picasso! She's working in the timber industry at the time. It involves a completely separate organism I haven't mentioned yet. No, so for example, lignin is important for making a tree stand up straight. ROBERT: So if all a tree could do was split air to get carbon, you'd have a tree the size of a tulip. So we're really -- like this is -- we're really at the very beginning of this. It's like a savings account? 28. ROBERT: There's -- on the science side, there's a real suspicion of anything that's anthropomorphizing a plant. If a plant doesn't have a brain what is choosing where to go? Hi. And I do that in my brain. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]. If I want to be a healthy tree and reach for the sky, then I need -- I need rocks in me somehow. And the salivation equivalent was the tilt of the plant? So Pavlov started by getting some dogs and some meat and a bell. JAD: If a plant doesn't have a brain what is choosing where to go? And of course we had to get Jigs out. Now, can you -- can you imagine what we did wrong? It's almost as if the forest is acting as an organism itself. ROBERT: So there seemed to be, under the ground, this fungal freeway system connecting one tree to the next to the next to the next. The fungus were literally sucking the nitrogen out of the springtails, and it was too late to get away. There are multiple ways of doing one thing, right? It's now the Wood Wide Web? [ANSWERING MACHINE: To play the message, press two. Me first. In 1997, a couple of scientists wrote a paper which describes how fungi Jennifer says that what the tubes do is they worm their way back and forth through the soil until they bump into some pebbles. Ring, meat, eat. ROBERT: Peering down at the plants under the red glow of her headlamp. ALVIN UBELL: And I've been in the construction industry ever since I'm about 16 years old. Enough of that! It's as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest. LARRY UBELL: Good. If you get too wrapped up in your poetic metaphor, you're very likely to be misled and to over-interpret the data. She thinks that they somehow remembered all those drops and it never hurt, so they didn't fold up any more. That's a -- learning is something I didn't think plants could do. And we can move it up, and we can drop it. AATISH BHATIA: All right. They need light to grow. From just bears throwing fish on the ground? Is it, like -- is it a plant? JENNIFER FRAZER: They had learned to associate the sound of the bell ROBERT: Which has, you know, for dogs has nothing to do with meat. It just kept curling and curling. I mean, you're out there in the forest and you see all these trees, and you think they're individuals just like animals, right? If there was only the fan, would the plant After three days of this training regime, it is now time to test the plants with just the fan, no light. We were so inconsistent, so clumsy, that the plants were smart to keep playing it safe and closing themselves up. Because if I let you go it's gonna be another 20 minutes until I get to talk. I can scream my head off if I want to. Playing via SpotifyPlaying via YouTube Playback options Listening on Switch Spotify device Open in Spotify Web Player Pretty much like the concept of Pavlov with his dog applied. No question there. Connecting your house to the main city water line that's in the middle of the street. But it was originally done with -- with a dog. Maybe each root is -- is like a little ear for the plant. And moved around, but always matched in the same way together. Fan, light, lean. I don't know. ROBERT: And for the meat substitute, she gave each plant little bit of food. He's not a huge fan of. [laughs]. It's a family business. There's not a leak in the glass. Pulled out a is that a root of some sort? But we are in the home inspection business. ROBERT: She found that the one stimulus that would be perfect was MONICA GAGLIANO: A little fan. SUZANNE SIMARD: So we know that Douglas fir will take -- a dying Douglas fir will send carbon to a neighboring Ponderosa pine. The bell, the meat and the salivation. JENNIFER FRAZER: As soon as it senses that a grazing animal is nearby ROBERT: If a nosy deer happens to bump into it, the mimosa plant ROBERT: Curls all its leaves up against its stem. They'd remember straight away. Had indeed turned and moved toward the fan, stretching up their little leaves as if they were sure that at any moment now light would arrive. SUZANNE SIMARD: Not a basset hound, but he was a beagle. So it wasn't touching the dirt at all. 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