On a related note, the NY Times Magazine's story on germs.

-- TN

Secrets (Plant-to-Plant)

* A new paper in Ecology Letters titled "Underground signals carried through common mycelial networks warn neighbouring plants of aphid attack" (2013) suggests that bean plants can signal other plants (through mycorrhizal fungi which colonize their roots) to produce aphid-repellent chemicals when aphids are in the area.  These chemicals also attract parasitoids that eat the aphids.

* I'll leave the sticky plant ethics to Corey, but the bean plant-on-bean plant dynamic raises a few other interesting issues.
 
* If we consider this signaling through fungi a form of communication between plants, does it shift our conception of communication?  Does it change how we see vegetables, minerals, animals?  How can plant-to-plant gossip reorient our vision of "Nature," what is "natural" and how material -- living and nonliving -- acts?  And what about the attracted parasitoids?  Is there such a thing as truly ecological material poetics?  Fungi/form/message?  The aesthetics of bean talk?  Things are getting crazy...


* A few thoughts: “… the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption… by preventing us from detecting (Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter ix). 

* “There is no object, no subject… But there are events. I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do” (Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope 281).

* “The basic dualism in the world lies not between spirit and nature, or phenomenon and noumenon, but between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things” (Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics 74). 

-- TN