James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Astrum Space · The Science Fact You've Been Taught for Years Is a Lie | Astrum Earth · 28 Apr 2026
podcast
Well, at least in as many different locations as possible to see if they match up.
It's a long, expensive and slow process, and had only been done by five studies for two tree species at the time the authors were writing.
The point is that even though these networks do form, we can't be sure that the links are continuous enough through time and space to make them a viable tool for communication.
For all we know, the links might only last a few days, or could be too fragile to connect trees from opposite ends of the forest.
The second claim was that seedlings can use the network to share resources, like the carbon we saw earlier, in order to help them grow, and not just within the same species.
This one hit especially close to home for the authors, because they had all worked with Suzanne Simard on this, and her 1997 study was the first to properly test it out in the field.
But what Karst and her colleagues started to question years later was that this behaviour doesn't seem to lie within the fungi's self-interest at all.
Think about it.
If you were a fungus connecting the roots of two tree species, why would you only ever funnel resources between the two trees rather than taking some for yourself?
And how is the fungus supposed to know the difference between carbon it can use for itself
and carbon to be sent for Paper Birch's friend, the Douglas Fir.
The authors reviewed 26 studies that claimed to prove resource transfer through the network, and found that for all of them, the results could be explained without involving the network at all.
For many, the resources could just as easily have been transferred through the soil with no need for fungal connections, and that includes the 1997 study.
Similarly, the authors note that no study has actually provided proof that this transferred carbon, if it exists, actually benefits the performance of the tree receiving it.
How could it?
If you were a tree with a system to generate food and farm resources on your own, why would you depend on help from an unrelated neighbor tree?
One that could easily die, become disconnected, or simply stop cooperating?
It doesn't seem like a very good strategy, evolution-wise.
Well, the authors weren't finished there.
The final claim was that mature trees were more likely to communicate and share with their own offspring through the network, which largely covers the whole mother tree idea.
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