The thick forest with trees and grasses! The forest is not just a concentration area of trees. Though they have no eyes to see and no mouths to talk, trees live together, communicating closely and helping each other.
Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, experimented on it: She covered a birch seedling with a plastic bag and injected carbon into it to see if it is transferred to other trees. As a result, carbon was measured in fir seedlings next to the birch. How did the birch deliver carbon to the fir?
The secret was under the ground. As there are huge belowground networks of mycorrhizal1 in the forest, trees exchange nutrients, chemicals, water, and insect defense signals among them. The tree, which is the center of the network, distributes and cares for the young trees that do not receive much sunlight at the bottom. A large and healthy tree can be connected with hundreds of trees by the mycorrhizal network.
1. A symbiotic association between a fungus (moulds, mushrooms, etc.) and a plant
The trees form a quiet harmony, raising the survival rate of young trees and making the whole forest lush and healthy.