[HN Gopher] Language of fungi derived from their electrical spik... ___________________________________________________________________ Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity Author : T-A Score : 168 points Date : 2022-04-06 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (royalsocietypublishing.org) (TXT) w3m dump (royalsocietypublishing.org) | reality_inspctr wrote: | This is wild. | | "We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity | hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune | generate the most complex sentences." | | Is this the first time a non-animal species has exhibited such | behavior under verifiable conditions? | AyyWS wrote: | The wind is talking to us. Chicago confirmed as having the most | talkative wind. | | They are consuming too much of their subject matter. | idiotsecant wrote: | They don't appear to literally be claiming that this is a | language, a less click-baity title would be 'Calcium wave | communication in networks of fungi mycelium'. This is not a | newly discovered phenomenon - we've known that fungi use | calcium derived electrical potentials to signal the mass to do | things for a long time. There's no evidence this is any more | complex than hormonal communication in plants, just a different | media. | mario143 wrote: | vmoore wrote: | I always wondered if certain fungi reached earth via an asteroid | that hit earth and was from a fertile exoplanet, and somehow | reached here. I like the idea of panspermia[0]. I always imagined | psilocybin-containing mushrooms as somewhat alien and almost | designed to alter consciousness, as if from another planet. | McKenna's 'stoned ape' theory, if true, would explain much of the | 'missing link' problem. | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia | pvarangot wrote: | The missing link is already explained by wild discontinuities | in evolution, which are pretty much a given on the evolutionary | chain of any species on earth given for how long life that | evolves has been present on the planet. There's records of | tribes with click based languages that can arrange very | effective and powerful hunting squads using spears an overpower | even herds or packs of the most dangerous animals in their | regions. Yeah they look wildly different than apes, but imagine | what they were doing to the other kinda differently looking | apes that didn't understand their clicks but understood "pointy | stick good", and that happened for thousands of years. | | Whole indigenous languages went exting in the late 20th century | in places like Bolivia or Australia and even during the 21st | century native languages are going extinct in California. In | thousands and thousands of years someone trying to re-walk | Darwins path may wonder were is the missing link in evolution | between something like Aztec and European remains found in the | West Coast, when there's none. Species can evolve in isolation | and then obliterate each other leaving a discontinuity or | clique within the genus, it happens all the time, and it's | puzzling but natural. | kuprel wrote: | Aztecs and European-Americans only separated about 40k years | ago, which is more recently than when East Asians and | Europeans separated. Would be confusing for future | civilizations to figure that one out | contingo wrote: | Psilocybin-producing mushrooms are widely dispersed across the | clade of all other true mushrooms and their genomes clearly | show there is no great mystery about their evolutionary history | or relationships to other fungi. Modern phylogenetics | completely discredits panspermia as an origin for particular | species or groups of fungi: they all share a single common | ancestor and they are all connected to our single Tree of Life | as with every other known lifeform on Earth. | rini17 wrote: | If we ever get viable neural interface available, I definitely | want to wire myself to my garden. The first thing I did on bare | plot was to put in rotten wood and cartons for fungi to grow. | sn00tz00t wrote: | Really impressive considering the setup. Would love to see them | grow fungi around a lattice to have input and output in a | controlled manner. | bitwize wrote: | And when we translate these fungal sentences... | | "Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is | unfulfilled Void." | throw1234651234 wrote: | I don't have anywhere near the scientific background to even | consider whether this is a report on "fungi are intelligent" or | "just some random electrical signals". If the former, it's | absolutely hilarious, because Terrance McKenna was possibly right | after all: | https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-... | | Of course, if this were "true" and "proven", I would imagine it | would be all over front-page news for every major publication. | vga805 wrote: | How would "intelligent" fungi have any bearing on the stoned | ape theory? The former seems neither necessary nor sufficient | for the latter. | throw1234651234 wrote: | You are absolutely right - the underlying premise is that | "fungi is intelligent, and it passes some of that | intelligence to the apes, when consumed". This makes no | sense. Just came to mind since McKenna also rants about fungi | networks being the largest intelligent being on the planet, | etc. | tazjin wrote: | I wouldn't state "makes no sense" about something like | that. For example, in sci-fi terms, psychedelic molecules | could be akin to a 'protomolecule' that attaches to self- | replicating entities and attempts to induce | ??consciousness?? | | We don't know any of this for sure. | xg15 wrote: | It's absolutely an interesting paper, but just to note: Their | finding is _not_ that the spike activity is a language. They just | propose it _might_ be a language and then derive a number of | statistics by treating it _like a language_ for the sake of the | argument. | | ... at least that was my understanding from the abstract and | introduction. | dalbasal wrote: | Seems so. | | Tangentially, I think it's unfortunate that "hope" can't help | form the frame here. I mean, it's an elephant in the room, but | I think it's friendly. | giantg2 wrote: | Wow this is really cool. I wonder if this can be harnessed to | charge a very small battery, which in turn can power a small LED. | Might be a unique variation on the potato powered light bulb | science fair project. I have quite a few blocks of mycelium | sitting around... | yosito wrote: | Maybe my anecdotal experience of taking mushrooms and feeling | like I can communicate with plants is not completely far fetched | nonsense. | dilippkumar wrote: | Book recommendation: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake [0]. | | The author discusses the possibility of intricately connected | subterranean mycelium networks electrically signaling each other | acting as a giant nervous system. He stops himself from calling | it a giant brain, but admits that the possibility isn't really | far fetched given everything else that we know about fungi. | | It's a fantastic book. Strong recommend. | | [0]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle- | redirect?... | doodlebugging wrote: | It would be interesting to see an experiment like this run on a | large fungal colony in the wild like one of those huge organisms | that you find in old-growth forests. You may be able to fine-tune | your understanding of their "language" syntax and format if you | could deploy a grid of sensors to track a message as it spreads | through the organism to see how efficiently it is delivered to | distant parts of the colony. | | It would also give an opportunity to see whether fungi play the | telephone game and how that affects those at the other end of the | "conversation". | | Thanks for this article. For me it confirms the notion that all | things alive need a method of communication that allows them to | use the resources in their environments to greatest effect. | Whether that involves chemical signaling, electrical signaling, | disapproving glances, the spoken word, etc. is irrelevant. It | appears that no matter how deeply you dig, there is a sense of | community in most living things and most things find ways to work | together with their environments to guarantee survival. Humans | could probably learn a few things from their steak toppings about | how best to utilize the bullshit many of us find ourselves | wallowing in. | [deleted] | bob55 wrote: | samaman wrote: | Adamatzky is a GOAT in biocomputing. Hes the sort of researcher | who really makes me question why we spend so much money on | developing quantum computers and other new ways of modeling | biosystems when using other biosystems as analogs seems far | cheaper and more fruitful. | tomcat27 wrote: | The goal of people doing basic research in math and science is | not producing more economic value. They really do it just for | fun. If what they do happen to be useful for others outside | their club, great, but that's never the goal. They might twist | words a little to get grants. Historically, their work has been | useful. ;) | bognition wrote: | Neuro PhD here. | | I haven't read the entire paper but this citations stands out: > | Fungi also exhibit trains of action-potential-like spikes, | detectable by intracellular and extracellular recordings | | Action potentials are the fundamental signaling mechanism used by | neurons [1]. Think of them as an electrical signal that a cell | actively propagates. Lots of cells use electrical potentials for | signaling; however, most of them spread gradually or passively. | Action potentials on the other hand the cell actively expends | energy to send information quickly. | | Really cool to see convergent biology (my personal guess) here. I | can only imagine what new things we're going to learn about fungi | and mycelium in the next few decades. In all seriousness | mushrooms COULD be conscious. | | 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential | idiotsecant wrote: | mushrooms are certainly not conscious. The information conveyed | over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order | of bits per hour. That particular box is a little small for | consciousness to be hiding in. A fruit fly has more processing | power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude. | fjabre wrote: | Your statement "mushrooms are certainly not conscious" cannot | be proven. | | It also makes the assumption that consciousness is something | we understand. This is certainly not the case. As science | still doesn't have a clue as to what it really is. | wonderwasp wrote: | I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at | different time scales? If an alien lived for one second but | its brain processed information billions of times faster than | ours, would they be right to consider us non-conscious? | idiotsecant wrote: | That's an interesting point! I suppose the definition of | 'consciousness' implies a certain timescale in my | internally unexamined definition but there's no reason that | need be the case! | buescher wrote: | If I understand your initial argument as implicitly | revised here, it's basically "whatever consciousness is, | it doesn't happen at the scale of some small number of | bits". But some fungi are among the largest organisms on | the planet. If this kind of signaling is going on within | them, imagine the throughput, even if the individual | signaling rates are low. | kadonoishi wrote: | I wonder if there could be conscious life inside neutron | stars, organized through nuclear reactions not chemical and | therefore going much faster. | idiotsecant wrote: | There is a book about this! It's Dragons Egg by R. | Forward and it's pretty good! | Vox_Leone wrote: | >>I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at | different time scales? | | I think you are correct in this insight. I also think that | the perceived [or relative] rhythm of the passage of time | would have huge implications here in this case: from the | fungal perspective, "our" world would be "seen" at very | high speed, which would prevent any form of interaction. It | would even prevent reciprocal detection. | | This "perceived time rate" difference could happen on an | astronomical scale and might contain the explanation of | informational paradoxes such as Fermi's. | RosanaAnaDana wrote: | > A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by | orders of magnitude. | | My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my | brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. Can you | please explain to me the relationship between processing | power and consciousness? | beambot wrote: | I doubt that. | | Ignoring confounding algorithmic factors, the _very_ rough | consensus for human brain appears to be 10^16 FLOPS. A | modern RTX3090 GPU has 10^13 FLOPS. I doubt your laptop has | 1000x the compute of a high-end desktop GPU. | idiotsecant wrote: | Let me answer your question with a question - what is the | processing power of your brain if you're so sure it's less | than your laptop? | joshmarlow wrote: | > My laptop has several orders of processing power more | than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. | | The classic counter-point to the speed difference here is | that biological brains are massively parallel - no | synchronized system clock, every logical element acting | async and in parallel - so that the number of operations | per second per element may be tiny (say 10s per second) | while the throughput of the entire system is massive. | | It's similar logic to deeply pipe-lined processor | architectures - pipelining may slow down execution of a | particular instruction but allow greater global throughput. | | Also, the logical operations performed by neurons (I | believe neuron behavior is modeled using differential | equations) appear significantly more complex than the | boolean switching behavior of the logic gates in CPUs. So | the amount of computation may be significantly larger than | it appears. | shironineja wrote: | no offense but I think you should consider 5g of cubensis and | report back after a few hours. | shak3zz wrote: | But if you have enough time and size... | | Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts | voldacar wrote: | There is no way to prove the statement "x is conscious". You | are just stating your opinion. | xhkkffbf wrote: | How many bits per hour do solitary animals like cougars or | hawks convey? I agree that whales sing endless, perhaps even | annoying other whales with their wails. But many animals | don't seem to even hit one bit per day. | idiotsecant wrote: | What do you mean? There is an extremely information dense | processing network inside each of those animals. I wasn't | making a comment on the information density of their | interface, but their processing itself | xhkkffbf wrote: | I think the paper measures the communication through the | electric field. So it's fair to compare that to the | amount of communication from the solitary animals, right? | I'm not measuring their overall computation that they | apply going through their day. And I also submit it may | be hard to know just how much computation the fungus does | when it's not communicating. | e12e wrote: | > The information conveyed over the whole of the network by | this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. | | How many hours, though? | mellosouls wrote: | _mushrooms are certainly not conscious_ | | Considering we don't understand consciousness it might be | wiser not to claim limits with certainty. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | At that bitrate we'd have to include a light switch in our | consciousness search. Which I am not willing to do. | maxbond wrote: | Bitrate is a total red herring here. What matters is what | computation is performed, not the rate at which it is | performed. That's like saying a 4-bit microcontroller | isn't a computer because it can't run Doom. | floober wrote: | I'd think it is something like a ratio of bitrate to | entropy. How quickly is information being processed | relative to how quickly it is being lost? | alan-hn wrote: | Do we know if it's being lost at all? | idiotsecant wrote: | Yes. That's thermodynamics. | [deleted] | jamal-kumar wrote: | I liked Max Tegmark's remark on how "consciousness is the | way information feels when it's being processed". I think | that it's safe to pretty roughly define it in those terms | if we're going to come to a better understanding of what it | might ultimately entail given more understandings like the | experiments in this research here indicate for deserving | more attention. | ianai wrote: | Agree. A more interesting question would be how to interact | with this channel in some meaningful way. Ie can we steer | some fungus activity in some way with introducing some | stimulus. Not exactly to "test for conscious" but just "can | we get repeatable output for a controlled input." | | I do though think it should be allowable to ponder out loud | things like "could this be conscious?" If only because it's | a much more fruitful and less self serving premise than how | science has conducted itself to this point. But also | because humans have something of a vested interest in not | having to admit that wide industrial processes harm | sentient life, for instance. | timschmidt wrote: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s | | Fungi expertly transport material around themselves. This | time-lapse shows traffic through a fungal network. DNA- | containing nuclei are stained green. Pulses of nuclei - | 'nuclear comets' - travel in hordes through the mycelium (of | Neurospora crassa). | | The role of nuclear comets is unclear. The most plausible | hypothesis is that the fungus uses comets to supply growing | spores with nuclei, although how the fungus is able to | shuttle the nuclei so quickly remains a puzzle. Nuclear | comets travel faster than material transported by microtubule | 'motors' (dynamic filaments that behave like a cross between | scaffolding and escalators). Comets are followed closely by | flocks of energy-producing mitochondria, which might play a | role in their rapid transport. | | Video was made using laser scanning confocal microscopy of | Neurospora crassa. The field of view is approximately 0.6 mm. | | Video (c) Patrick Hickey | jamal-kumar wrote: | That's incredible, thanks for sharing that! I've only ever | seen videos of neurons stained like that and they sure | don't seem to be doing the same thing, though I think I | remember what I saw had something to do with genetically | engineering the kinases to clump together so they could | actually be seen | bognition wrote: | Thats all going to depend the constraints you place on | consciousness. Hell in the animal kingdom we struggle to | define which animals are conscious and they all have very | similar compute hardware. | | Mushrooms are so different than anything we know it's hard to | rule out what they are or are not doing. There are mycelium | networks that span massive spaces, 10s of square kilometers. | There is a lot of mass, a tightly interconnected network that | senses, computes, and changes its environment. So its hard to | really rule anything out yet. | | Honestly, I think there is a lot of complexity happening on | this planet that we are missing, especially if we open | ourselves up to larger timescales. | polishdude20 wrote: | At some point the word "consciousness" loses its already | muddled meaning. Humans are conscious, dogs are conscious, | fish are conscious, mollusks are conscious, insects are | conscious, bacteria is conscious, fungi is conscious etc. | | We don't even have a concrete definition for what conscious | means but we use that classification as a means to make | rules about what we can and can't do to certain entities. | Can we destroy an ecosystem that has been found to be full | of conscious mycelium? Is that worse than if we determined | it was not conscious after all? Without a concrete | definition of what consciousness is, we assign | consciousness to things based on feeling and on what we | want to signal to other humans about these entities. | alan-hn wrote: | I think that means we didn't have a good definition or | understanding to begin with | [deleted] | djitz wrote: | Well, that settles it. Let's pack it up, team. | antattack wrote: | Brings to mind this TED talk: Electrical experiments with | plants that count and communicate | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw | xg15 wrote: | Am I reading the abstract correctly that the spike duration is | measured in _hours_ though? That 's an odd change of scale | compared to neurons, especially as the scale of the actual | entities (fungal networks vs networks of neuron cells) don't | seem that different | trenchgun wrote: | Scale is quite different. Consider the density. | tehchromic wrote: | Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any | doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of? | | I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically | it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive | definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we | can safely assess what is or isn't conscious. | | Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from | lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of | some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, | monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, | bacteria, and all living things display some level of | consciousness. | | And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the | universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in | forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due | to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a | biological organism ourselves. | | It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these | definitions is correct! | | What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the | very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, | such that the inherent assumptions made in building our | scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of | what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we | do understand must be all there is. | | That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms | of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the | philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the | institution of scientific realism. | | So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in | fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as | most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate! | plutonorm wrote: | I object to being called weird. It's quite a logical position | to hold, many modern philosophers hold a panpsychist or | similar view. | tehchromic wrote: | Others feel that weird is the greatest compliment. | oceanplexian wrote: | Maybe this is closer to spirituality than science, but I've | been reading Eckhart Tolle and he explains in a few of his | books that the whole idea of "I" or "My self" is an illusion | that's created by the ego. This is also the message from a | lot of Eastern philosophy. | | I would hazard to guess that individual consciousness doesn't | actually exist, so of course a tree can't be individually | conscious because neither can a human. We (both the tree and | the human) are part of a collective "consciousness" that is | life itself. | RosanaAnaDana wrote: | Man just wait till you hear about plasmodesma.. | dilippkumar wrote: | > In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious | | There is a fungus [0]. that takes over a carpenter ant's brain | and makes it climb up plants and clutch on to a leaf with it's | jaw and hang down from it. The fungus then sprouts the fruiting | body from the dangling ant and spreads its spores. | | As an armchair theorist, anything that can interface with a | brain and coordinate a nervous system to produce complicated | movement has to be capable of computation at some level. | | [0]. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na... | meetups323 wrote: | > computation at some level | | Unfortunately that term applies to basically everything... | computation at every classical level we know only requires | "maybe have state, maybe update state in response to | environment, maybe move to new environment based on new | state, maybe repeat". | PartiallyTyped wrote: | We have quite a bit of evidence that our gut bacteria | influence our long term actions and behaviour through | neurotransmitter precursors. | [deleted] | Aardwolf wrote: | Armchair theorist as well, but all consciousness aside, it | could also be that there's just a simple chemical that makes | ants want to climb up (just like some hormones make the human | brain want things), so that there's no computation involved, | the mushroom might just happen to excrete the right chemical | in the right place | arrosenberg wrote: | That seems more likely to me too. Imagine a fungus that | could provide dopamine directly to the brain when a human | host meets a certain condition (e.g. a certain amount of | direct sunlight, humidity, wind). | monkeybutton wrote: | Like toxoplasmosis? | dunefox wrote: | I mean, apparently toxoplasmosis or something like it can | result in personality changes even in humans. | everhard_ wrote: | Agree, it's more like they're responding to stimuli, | could we derive somehow that their genes have evolved | some degree of ... intelligence? | arrosenberg wrote: | Eh, I'd say that's a point for debate, but I would argue | stochastic survival probability under some prior | conditions that haven't changed enough to force further | competition. | stadium wrote: | Not exactly this scenario, but the psilocybe genus | produces chemicals very similar to serotonin. | bdamm wrote: | Getting the ant to clamp onto the underside of a branch or | leaf and then stay there until it dies is a bit harder to | explain. However I am also inclined to believe there is a | localized mechanism at play, such as locating the jaw | actuation through connective tissue RNA. Even so, there | must be some basic signaling and state detection at play. | It's probably the biological equivalent of a music box that | just plays the notes it's been fixed to play, but still | interesting. | colechristensen wrote: | People tend to underestimate the ability of very simple | systems to result in complex behavior. It is entirely | possible that this ant hijacking is entirely done though a | few very simple manipulations of the existing ant nervous | system and more likely than a much more complex fungal brain | replacement. | xg15 wrote: | > _It is entirely possible that this ant hijacking is | entirely done though a few very simple manipulations of the | existing ant nervous system_ | | Hasn't that been ruled out by now though? | | (Content warning: Zombie ant fungus details) | | I read articles about that fungus and I believe for a long | time it was assumed that the fungus rewires something | inside the ant's brain that makes it want to climb to the | top of a grass blade etc. - so it would "only" manipulate | the high-level goals of the ant but not control the more | complex and dynamic low-level operations (such as walking | or navigating) directly. | | However, a few months ago there was a paper about more | detailed research on the molecular mechanisms the fungus | uses for the takeover. Turns out, the former hypothesis was | wrong and in fact it _does_ control the ant 's arms/legs | directly. If that's true, then the fungus itself must | somehow actively steer the ant towards the grass. | trenchgun wrote: | Link please? | xg15 wrote: | This is the article I got the info from: | http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how- | the-z... | | This seems to be the referenced paper: | https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1711673114 | | I was wrong about it being from a few months ago though. | It was released in 2017 already. | rhn_mk1 wrote: | Could we be underestimating the ability of very simple | systems to result in consciousness? | colechristensen wrote: | No. | | I don't think the logistic map is conscious, but it is | very complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map | | What I'm talking about re: ants is a few chemical signals | specifically targeting ant behaviors resulting in the | infected behavior. I don't think the fungus is any more | conscious than a handful of pills. | yosito wrote: | > It is entirely possible that this ant hijacking is | entirely done though a few very simple manipulations | | It is entirely possible that human motivations and | reasoning are driven by similarly simple mechanisms. The | best example I can think of is how much of an asshole I can | be to my family when I'm hangry. | colechristensen wrote: | The complex conscious and unconscious behavior can indeed | be manipulated by quite simple things (hunger, | stimulants, alcohol) but the complexity does not come | from the lever that made the change, it's just pushing | levers all over the place of your existing feedback | cycles which results in much different outcomes. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | Don't know if you did that on purpose, but "hangry" is | such a beautiful word. | bdamm wrote: | "Hangry" is now a widespread term. It's even in Merriam- | Webster: https://www.merriam- | webster.com/dictionary/hangry | axiom92 wrote: | Cool video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vijGdWn5-h8 | gigaflop wrote: | If fungus has a language, it means we can 'talk' to it. | | So long as we can put electricity in, and get different | electric signals out, we have a sort of interface. | | If they're sentient, then wow, great. If not, we can probably | work out the right signals and species to use in growing a | mushroom-based Turing machine. | nerdponx wrote: | It's not quite "computation", but apparently you can wire a | mushroom up to a modular synthesizer and get something | resembling music out of it. | | Someone has a very entertaining YouTube channel full of | this content: https://www.youtube.com/c/MycoLyco. The | titles are great too, like "Reishi Talks To Lions Mane | About Life In a Bag" (posted 4 days ago). | williamsmj wrote: | Here to recommend Sue Burke's Semiosis/Interference sci-fi | duology about first contact with a intelligent plant life. | Melatonic wrote: | People do not realize just how important Fungi are - there was a | point at which _Trees_ were the new hotness and Fungi had not | evolved yet - prehistoric trees basically took over the entire | planet and there was nothing to break down all of the leftover | dead wood on the ground. We are talking layers and layers of dead | trees everywhere. | | Then Fungi evolved and started breaking all that down and | eventually a long time later we get animals. | citruscomputing wrote: | Fungi were on land before trees (they broke down rocks to make | soil, and were the OG roots). It took them a while to learn to | digest.. I think lignin was it? | | Half remembered from first chapter of Entangled Life. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-06 23:00 UTC)