The Green Planet

Grandma finds the best documentaries and nature shows when I go to visit her. This summer we are watching The Green Planet, a journey into the hidden world of plants.

We learned that fungi can communicate with trees through their roots. They have their own Internet below ground called the "wood wide web." Trees can pass nutrients along to other trees in their network and alert them when dangers are present.

Building concrete structures near forests, logging and global warming all disrupt fungal networks and endanger the trees who depend on them for support.

While fungi have had Internet for 400 million years, for humans it's a more recent phenomenon. When grandma gave me a venus fly trap as a child, it didn't come with an instruction manual. There was no YouTube video we could consult to learn how to care for it. We thought the plant was either a picky eater or very lazy. It wouldn't catch its own flies and wouldn't eat the bugs I caught for it. The traps wouldn't close all the way and the plant withered and died. This video explains why. It was because the censor hairs weren't triggered enough times to start the digestive process.