## Metadata - Author: [[Zoë Schlanger]] - Full Title: The Light Eaters - Category: #books ## Highlights - Nature is not a puzzle waiting to be put together, or a codex waiting to be deciphered. Nature is chaos in motion. Biological life is a spiraling diffusion of possibilities, fractal in its profusion. Every organism, and certainly every plant, has ricocheted out of another fragment of the evolutionary web of green leafy things to variate further. These each are of course still morphing, because that sort of thing never ends, except in extinction. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=339)) - In 2017, researchers at the University of Birmingham identified the presence of a “decision-making center” within dormant seeds that integrated information and decided when the plant should emerge. ([Location 867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=867)) - animals and plants are clearly different, yet they share a common world. Their daily travails are very similar. They need to find food, and they need to find mates. And they need to do it all while other things are trying to eat them. ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=1049)) - This new research raises existential questions about what we think of as a healthy plant community, and what it means to actually protect them. Given these findings, simply growing plants is not enough; if communication is a vital function of plants, then our care for them must also extend to protecting their ability to “talk” to one another. ([Location 1108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=1108)) - That is quite literally the essence of the entire question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to any stimuli at all? How does information about the world get integrated, triaged by importance, and translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world at all, without a centralized place to parse all that information? ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=1441)) - Calcium is not, in itself, a form of information. It’s basically the footprint left behind by electricity, a kind of “second messenger.” In animals, calcium levels increase in a cell when ion channels open. Ion channels open when electricity is passing through. So calcium shows up in a cell directly after the electricity does. ([Location 1445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=1445)) - Glutamate is the most important neurotransmitter in our own brains, and research has recently found that it plays a role in plant signaling too, boosting the signal. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=1487)) - Plumbers are accustomed to the frustrating phenomenon of tree roots bursting through sealed water pipes. Cities spend millions each year repairing municipal pipes punctured by “root intrusion.” Germany, for example, spends an estimated thirty-seven million euros per year repairing root-burst pipes. The U.S. Forest Service points to root intrusion as the cause of more than half of all sewage pipe blockages. ([Location 1764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=1764)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Beauty is almost always a form of communication. Namely, it communicates “choose me.” Aesthetic preference has been demonstrated across the animal kingdom; animals are attracted to what they perceive as beautiful. It’s no wonder that plants incorporate beauty for this purpose too. Flowers themselves evolved in order to be beautiful to animals. Originally, most land plants relied on the wind to carry their pollen grains from one plant to the next. But eventually land animals arrived on the scene and began to eat the plants’ protein-rich pollen. In the process of their grazing, these animals transported some of the pollen from flower to flower, completing fertilization in a far more efficient and tidy manner than the wind ever could. Soon plants began to morph some of their leaves into colorful little flags—early petals—to better direct animals toward the location of pollen. These petals took on more elaborate colors and shapes, eventually producing symbols visible to the specific anatomy of the eye of their pollinator. Nectar and floral scents added to the display. These enticing configurations emerged as flowers, which pushed themselves to aesthetic extremes in the race to attract creatures with ever more complex eye anatomy and ever more discerning aesthetic tastes.* The beauty of flowers now speaks clearly even to us. ([Location 2351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2351)) - WE KNOW PLANTS’ biochemical genius makes them resilient, defends them well against predators, and gets their needs met in subtle and overt ways. And they don’t always hew to what a European sensibility might call the “natural order” of things. They don’t stick to their own species, or even to some clearly definable gender. After all, the orchid is reproducing through sex with a wasp. Some plants almost exclusively clone themselves, like aspens or dandelions, and still others clone themselves sometimes and have sex other times, like the strawberry. Many plants are bisexual, with male and female genitalia occurring together on the same flower (in plant anatomy these are called, intriguingly, “perfect” flowers). The ancient ginkgo tree can spontaneously switch the sex of a section of its body, producing a female branch on an otherwise male tree. Ginkgo are one of the oldest lineages of trees we live alongside, having persisted for hundreds of millions of years, stubbornly surviving since the time of the dinosaurs. Their sexual fluidity may make them remarkably resilient to whatever the eons have thrown at them. ([Location 2362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2362)) - There is something decidedly queer in all of this—the orchids and aspens and strawberries and antplants and ginkgoes—a sense of sensual entanglement that disregards binaries, runs across the species boundary, and almost gleefully defies heteronormative modes of reproduction. This lens might also help us escape the idea that everything in nature is a battle, with a clear winner. Sometimes it may be an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely. ([Location 2392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2392)) - As the stakes are becoming clear about how crucial plant communication with other species may be, we are coming to understand that we may be muddling their communication in the first place. The pollution steadily filling the air appears to sabotage plants’ ability to send and interpret each other’s signals. Just as plants’ communication can cross the species divide, so can ours. And we’re speaking to them in smog. ([Location 2416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2416)) - We are clearly losing the war on pests. The world uses about two million tons of conventional pesticides to control weeds and bugs each year. (The United States alone says it uses one billion pounds a year.) And these aren’t onetime applications; most crops need to be doused in pesticide several times a growing season to keep the pests away. As a matter of course, pests evolve to become resistant to pesticides, requiring higher and higher doses, until entirely new formulas must be developed. The consequences of all this to human health can be severe. Globally, as many as 11,000 farmworkers are fatally poisoned by pesticides each year, and another 385 million are severely poisoned but don’t die, to say nothing of the birth defects, breathing disorders, and other long-term health impacts of constant exposure to regular doses of the stuff.* Meanwhile rainwater that runs over sprayed fields takes the pesticides off farms and into streams and rivers, which taint water supplies, extending the health impacts to the general population of humans along with fish and aquatic wildlife. ([Location 2457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2457)) - Strawberries offer a clear example of the advantages of companion planting. A strawberry flower is self-fertile; it can produce fruit using its own pollen, or essentially by having sex with itself. It also can cross-pollinate with other strawberry plants, though this requires the help of flying insects. Farmers know that strawberries will produce a third more fruit—and much of it higher quality—when planted beside borage, a medicinal herb that blooms in perfect blue stars. The borage attracts the strawberry’s pollinator; the better, more copious berries emerge when the sexually adaptive strawberry opts to copulate by way of insects rather than with itself. ([Location 2471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2471)) - “I think the plants are primary organisms, and we are the secondary ones. We are fully dependent on them. Without them, we would not be able to survive,” Baluška says. “The opposite situation would not be so drastic for them.” ([Location 2608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CFM4SMPF&location=2608))