Tom Holland already looks like a young Tom Holland though

I like this comment for many reasons, but I'll mention just that I have never heard the word "kayfabe" until today and I love it!

This comment is the definition of joie de vivre.

The mycorrhizal networks are a real phenomenon, and as recently as 2016 were confirmed to share resources between trees.

Researchers exposed certain trees to a specific carbon isotope and found their unfed neighbors were processing that specific isotope despite not being exposed.

We've also found that many plants generate interacting electrical fields that help promote pollination and may indicate to pollinators which plants are ready to be harvested.

We've also found, by sequencing fungal DNA, that mother trees do have a resource sharing preference for their direct offspring.

We don't have hard evidence for direct communication between trees, in the sense that we don't speak tree. We do have hard evidence that they share resources, have preferences, express pain signals externally and other plants react, and can indicate information to other species.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll keep an eye out for it.

But it helps me anthropomorphize them into ents so it must be true

I just want to point out that this source indicates researchers reviewed 1500 papers on the topic and found that unsupported claims had doubled.

However, they never indicate the number or give a percentage of those 1500 papers that featured unsupported claims.

So is it doubling from 2 to 4, or from 700 to 1400? Because that's a major difference.

This is a problem with AI articles on science. They skim other AI articles and repeat without bringing all the important facts with them. Then we get dozens of results for one claim about science, with only maybe one or two original sources.

Then the idea spreads through reddit or whatever forum you prefer.

We know trees share resources, that they have been demonstrated to signal pain and danger to other plants, that they signal food availability to pollinators via electromagnetic fields. We have had hard evidence for all of this.

It's an interesting hypothesis run amok because a core group of biologists WANTED it to be true so badly.

There's a GREAT episode (ep. 425) from the In Defense of Plants podcast that covers the misinformation and misunderstanding perfectly.

David Attenborough said it, opinion discarded