Trees are unbelievably cool. My favorite fact is that the actual living surface of a tree’s roots, called the rhizosphere, consists of extremely small, ephemeral hairlike structures that supply the whole, gigantic tree. The large roots we think of are mainly structural. Where the actual “rubber meets the road” of the life form is incredibly small. Within that rhizosphere the interplay of plant, fungi, bacteria, and soil is so intricate that it’s difficult to even say where the soil ends and the tree begins.
So many amazing things happen in this space. For example, the tree exudes sugars out of the roots because it creates an electrical gradient that pushes nutrients into the root cells. This way the trees, which are masters of energy efficiency, can use passive transport to uptake nutrients. Fungi have adapted to this energy and symbiotically extend the rhizosphere beyond what the tree is capable of alone. In fact an entire world of organisms has evolved inside the rhizosphere. Similar worlds exist in the bark, the cambium, the buds, the leaves, the flower, and the fruit.
It’s like this enormous organism is a fractal masterpiece, and the closer you look the more clever it is. And we all depend on it, because plants are the only organisms capable of turning sunlight into usable energy. Apart from some things living off deep-sea vents, that’s it. Even the energy you’re using to read this right now passed through a chloroplast. It’s just so cool.
Another thing that’s crazy about trees is that there is no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically.
As in: there is no branch on the tree of life for trees. There is no first tree from which all trees are descended. There are trees that have a common ancestor that was definitely not a tree, and there are there are plants that are definitely not trees that are descended from trees.
If you look at the tree of life for plants, you see trees evolving into other types of plants and evolving back into trees all over the place.
I feel like it’s time to reframe this from “there is no such thing as a tree”, “there is no such thing as a fish” to “trees and fishes (and crabs) are very competitive types of life, and many phylogenetic lines are pressured towards those traits”.
Biology has gotten real stupid about verbiage and communication lately, in my opinion.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology.
It’s astounding how far simple trial and error has brought us. No need for scrum or agile!
To be fair, it did also take several thousand years to develop instead of a few decades.
It took the Earth almost 1 billion years to come up with photosynthesis 🙃
Yeah, this is a really really neat way of looking at nature that I sometimes thought about. Nature is pretty fucking darn technologically advanced
Well, yeah, because we can’t make that yet. If you describe anything in nature we can’t make with technology as technology then it sounds like science fiction. That’s just tautological!
Imagine aliens that don’t have anything like trees.
They’d be so fucking jealous.
Imagine being born on a world made of just mostly slimy grasslands, with bare rock and deserts and a shallow sea full of parasites. And the atmosphere is awful, so running a marathon would be like physically impossible. Actually, besides the dry parts, that kinda sounds like Florida… At least Florida has trees, though. Imagine how shit Florida would be without any trees at all.
I come from outer space: Your grass is too dry, lacks life and squishiness. Your rocks are sharp and uneven and stupidly confusing. Your sea is too deep, too empty (damn scary) and it lacks nutrients. What even is the point of running marathons? Cultural quirk to want to move that fast. The Trees are nice though, gotta leave you that.
