## 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]]