The Wood Wide Web

Beneath the forest floor, trees are anything but the solitary sentinels they appear to be. Threaded through the soil, a gossamer web of fungal filaments splices their roots into a single, murmuring collective, ferrying sugar, water and chemical alarm-calls from one trunk to the next. A dying elder may bequeath its remaining carbon to saplings it will never see mature, while a tree under siege from aphids can telegraph a warning that prompts its neighbours to marshal their defences. What we once dismissed as brute competition turns out to be shot through with something uncannily like reciprocity.