00:00Do trees have their own internet?
00:06It may sound wild, but an underground network of fungi may allow trees to communicate across vast distances.
00:12Such mycorrhizal networks could share resources, like water and nitrogen, as well as warnings about insect predators.
00:19A team of biologists from Canada and the US made this the focus of their own myth-busting study,
00:24taking into account over 1,500 scientific papers and tallying up the number of claims based on flimsy evidence.
00:31The verdict? Such claims of a wood-wide web may in fact be overblown.
00:35While fungi are known to form interdependent relationships with trees by living within plant roots or in nearby soil,
00:41there's simply not enough evidence to indicate that vast, complex resource-sharing networks exist.
00:46To date, only five studies have been performed across only two forest types to map out the fungi and trees in a forest,
00:52While some positive results have been produced artificially,
00:55it's hard to rule out alternative explanations in such studies.
00:58The findings published in Nature Ecology and Evolution call for a more critical eye when it comes to submitting research.
01:04Let us devise new experiments, demand better evidence, think critically about alternative explanations for results,
01:10and become more selective with the claims we disseminate.
01:12If not, we risk turning the wood-wide web into a fantasy beneath our feet.
01:22enario 1
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