The Wood Wide Web

As a kid, Suzanne Simard grew up in the rainforests of British Columbia and she normally spent her summers visiting forests around and exploring them along with her family, which included a curious dog named Jiggs.

- Smt. Sujatha Rao

One particular summer day, they had to rush to pull the distraught Jiggs from an outhouse pit that he had accidentally fallen into. While digging around the pit, she stumbled across a miracle. She stared in astonishment at the exposed root system, which was like a massive mat of intertwining.

That's when it hit her that there is a whole world right underneath her feet. When she became an adult and learned that plants normally fight for sunlight, it didn't sound right to her. She had watched the fir tree die when she took out the birch tree next to it, as though both of them had benefited from each other's existence. In order to understand this better, she ran an experiment by injecting gas tagged with radioactive isotope into some plants.

That's when she discovered that forty-seven trees across 30 feet from each other showed presence of those radioactive isotopes, illuminating the fact that somehow the trees had shared their food or minerals through an underground network of sorts. She also found out that the largest and the oldest trees had the greater number of connections.

This fascinating event generated enough interest in a team from the Radio Lab to meet an expert named Roy Halling from Bronx Botanical Garden in New York to study the tiny, white thread-like growth attached to the roots of a big oak tree. On closer examination, they realized that those white threads in fact were tubes of fungus, which as we know, are closer to being an animal than a plant.