Plants move slowly — except when they need to move fast, for example to capture insects (and eat them). They can even explode to scatter seeds or spores, and sometimes spores can jump around. Find out how they manage to move so fast in this ScienceNews article and watch a fun little video of speedster plants set to the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
We know that plants communicate with each other. So do pathogens. Sometimes, though, plants and pathogens share the same communication system. Botany One takes a look. Plants and pathogens do this because they are a holoboint, a “macrobe and its numerous microbial associates.” The web of life gets more and more complex the closer we look at it.
Quartz brings us this article: “A debate over plant consciousness is forcing us to confront the limitations of the human mind.” I wrote my book to explore that question on a planet far away because I didn’t think it could happen here. I may have been wrong.
The Onion offers its own satiric approach to that question. The Onion is Earth’s humor root.
Finally, enjoy a very short story (one paragraph), “The New Trees” by Ben Black at Daily Science Fiction.
Semiosis 