During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, a researcher at
the University of Washington started noticing something strange
in the college’s experimental forest. For years, a blight of
caterpillars had been munching the trees to death. Then,
suddenly, the caterpillars themselves started dying off. The forest
was able to recover. But what had happened to the caterpillars?
The researcher, David Rhoades, who had a background in
chemistry and zoology, found that the trees in the forest had
changed the chemistry of their leaves, to the detriment of the
caterpillars. Even more surprising, trees that had been nibbled by
caterpillars weren’t the only ones that had changed their
chemistry. Some were changing their leaves before caterpillars
reached them, as if they’d received a warning. A shocking
possibility presented itself: the trees were signalling to one
another.
Zoë Schlanger recounts Rhoades’s story in her new book,
“The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence
Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.”
The contemporary world of botany that Schlanger explores in
“The Light Eaters” is still divided over the matter of how plants
sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate.
But, in the past twenty years, the idea that plants communicate
has gained broader acceptance. Research in recent decades has
shown garden-variety lima beans protecting themselves by
synthesizing and releasing chemicals to summon the predators of
the insects that eat them; lab-grown pea shoots navigating mazes
and responding to the sound of running water; and a chameleonic
vine in the jungles of Chile mimicking the shape and color of
nearby plants by a mechanism that’s not yet understood.
Schlanger acknowledges that some of the research yields as
many questions as answers. It’s not clear how the vine gathers
information about surrounding plants to perform its mimicry.
New Yorker. 12 June 2024. Adaptado.
Conforme o texto, a experiência conduzida por David Rhoades,
na floresta experimental da Universidade de Washington,
tornou-se marcante para a botânica, por revelar a
