What Plants Are Saying About Us

This is really different.  What if the most important aspect of the human brain happens to be its majorly extended surface area?  Turns out that we are talking about 1500 to 2000 square centimeters or almost two large pages of newspaper.

Now imagine a field of dandelions with their massdive head of petals.  Ceertainly enough to provide potential cognitiln for the God of the dandelions which is something encountered along with the green man.  All of a sudden area and affinity maters for cognition.

All of a sudden plant cognition is not so unlikely.  Can we share our intents?

What Plants Are Saying About Us

Your brain is not the root of cognition.

BY AMANDA GEFTER

March 7, 2023

Iwas never into house plants until I bought one on a whim—a prayer plant, it was called, a lush, leafy thing with painterly green spots and ribs of bright red veins. The night I brought it home I heard a rustling in my room. Had something scurried? A mouse? Three jumpy nights passed before I realized what was happening: The plant was moving. During the day, its leaves would splay flat, sunbathing, but at night they’d clamber over one another to stand at attention, their stems steadily rising as the leaves turned vertical, like hands in prayer.

“Who knew plants do stuff?” I marveled. Suddenly plants seemed more interesting. When the pandemic hit, I brought more of them home, just to add some life to the place, and then there were more, and more still, until the ratio of plants to household surfaces bordered on deranged. Bushwhacking through my apartment, I worried whether the plants were getting enough water, or too much water, or the right kind of light—or, in the case of a giant carnivorous pitcher plant hanging from the ceiling, whether I was leaving enough fish food in its traps. But what never occurred to me, not even once, was to wonder what the plants were thinking.

To understand how human minds work, he started with plants.

I was, according to Paco Calvo, guilty of “plant blindness.” Calvo, who runs the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain where he studies plant behavior, says that to be plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world.

It’s easy to dismiss such claims because they fly in the face of our leading theory of cognitive science. That theory goes by names like “cognitivism,” “computationalism,” or “representational theory of mind.” It says, in short, the mind is in the head. Cognition boils down to the firings of neurons in our brains.

And plants don’t have brains.

“When I open up a plant, where could intelligence reside?” Calvo says. “That’s framing the problem from the wrong perspective. Maybe that’s not how our intelligence works, either. Maybe it’s not in our heads. If the stuff that plants do deserves the label ‘cognitive,’ then so be it. Let’s rethink our whole theoretical framework.”

Calvo wasn’t into plants, either. Not at first. As a philosopher, he was busy trying to understand human minds. When he began studying cognitive science in the 1990s, the dominant view was the brain was a kind of computer. Just as computers represent data in transistors, which can be in “on” or “off” states corresponding to 0s and 1s, brains were thought to represent data in the states of their neurons, which could be “on” or “off” depending on whether they fire. Computers manipulate their representations according to logical rules, or algorithms, and brains, by analogy, were believed to do the same.1

But Calvo wasn’t convinced. Computers are good at logic, at carrying out long, precise calculations—not exactly humanity’s shining skill. Humans are good at something else: noticing patterns, intuiting, functioning in the face of ambiguity, error, and noise. While a computer’s reasoning is only as good as the data you feed it, a human can intuit a lot from just a few vague hints—a skill that surely helped on the savannah when we had to recognize a tiger hiding in the bushes from just a few broken stripes. “My hunch was that there was something really wrong, something deeply distorted about the very idea that cognition had to do with manipulating symbols or following rules,” Calvo says.THE PLANT WHISPERER: Paco Calvo once studied artificial intelligence to determine whether it could help unlock secrets of cognition. He decided it couldn’t. Plants were the key. Courtesy of Universidad de Murcia.

Calvo went to the University of California San Diego to work on artificial neural networks. Rather than dealing in symbols and algorithms, neural networks represent data in large webs of associations, where one wrong digit doesn’t matter so long as more of them are right, and from a few sketchy clues—stripe, rustle, orange, eye—the network can bootstrap a half-decent guess—tiger!

Artificial neural networks have led to breakthroughs in machine learning and big data, but they still seemed, to Calvo, a far cry from living intelligence. Programmers train the neural networks, telling them when they’re right and when they’re wrong, whereas living systems figure things out for themselves, and with small amounts of data to boot. A computer has to see, say, a million pictures of cats before it can recognize one, and even then all it takes to trip up the algorithm is a shadow. Meanwhile, you show a 2-year-old human one cat, cast all the shadows you want, and the toddler will recognize that kitty.

“Artificial systems give us nice metaphors,” Calvo says. “But what we can model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition. Biological systems are doing something entirely different.”

Calvo was determined to find out what that was, to get at the essence of how real biological systems perceive, think, imagine, and learn. Humans share a long evolutionary history with other forms of life, other forms of mind, so why not start with the most basic living systems and work from the bottom up? “If you study systems that look way different and yet you find similarities,” Calvo says, “maybe you can put your finger on what is truly at stake.”

So Calvo traded neural networks for a green thumb. To understand how human minds work, he was going to start with plants.

It turns out it’s true: Plants do stuff.

For one thing, they can sense their surroundings. Plants have photoreceptors that respond to different wavelengths of light, allowing them to differentiate not only brightness but color. Tiny grains of starch in organelles called amyloplasts shift around in response to gravity, so the plants know which way is up. Chemical receptors detect odor molecules; mechanoreceptors respond to touch; the stress and strain of specific cells track the plant’s own ever-changing shape, while the deformation of others monitors outside forces, like wind. Plants can sense humidity, nutrients, competition, predators, microorganisms, magnetic fields, salt, and temperature, and can track how all of those things are changing over time. They watch for meaningful trends—Is the soil depleting? Is the salt content rising?—then alter their growth and behavior through gene expression to compensate.

Plants can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin.

Plants’ abilities to sense and respond to their surroundings lead to what seems like intelligent behavior. Their roots can avoid obstacles. They can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin. If a plant finds itself in a crowd, it will invest resources in vertical growth to remain in light; if nutrients are on the decline, it will opt for root expansion instead. Leaves munched on by insects send electrochemical signals to warn the rest of the foliage,2 and they’re quicker to react to threats if they’ve encountered them in the past. Plants chat among themselves and with other species. They release volatile organic compounds with a lexicon, Calvo says, of more than 1,700 “words”—allowing them to shout things that a human might translate as “caterpillar incoming” or “*$@#, lawn mower!”

Their behavior isn’t merely reactive—plants anticipate, too. They can turn their leaves in the direction of the sun before it rises, and accurately trace its location in the sky even when they’re kept in the dark. They can predict, based on prior experience, when pollinators are most likely to show up and time their pollen production accordingly. A plant’s form is a record of its history. Its cells—shaped by experience—remember.

Chat? Anticipate? Remember? It’s tempting to tame all those words with scare quotes, as if they can’t mean for plants what they mean for us. For plants, we say, it’s biochemistry, just physiology and brute mechanics—as if that’s not true for us, too.

Besides, Calvo says, plant behavior can’t be reduced to mere reflexes. Plants don’t react to stimuli in predetermined ways—they’d never have made it this far, evolutionarily speaking, if they did. Having to deal with a changing environment while being rooted to one spot means having to set priorities, strike compromises, change course on the fly.

Consider stomata: tiny pores on the undersides of leaves. When the pores are open, carbon dioxide floods in—that’s good, that’s breathing—but water vapor can escape. So how open should the stomata be at any given time? It depends on the availability of water in the soil—if there’s plenty more for the taking, it’s worth letting the carbon dioxide in. If the dirt’s dry, the leaves have to retain water. For the leaves to make that decision, the roots have to tell them about the availability of water. The leaves communicate their own needs to the roots in turn, encouraging them, for example, to form symbiotic relationships with specific microorganisms in the soil.3

If a plant could respond to sensory information on a one-to-one basis—when the light does x, the plant does y—it would be fair to think of plants as mere automatons, operating without thought, without a point of view. But in real life, that’s never the case. Like all organisms, plants are immersed in dynamic, precarious environments, forced to confront problems with no clear solutions, betting their lives as they go. “A biological system is never exposed to just a single source of stimulation,” Calvo says. “It always has to make a compromise among different things. It needs some kind of valence, a higher-level perspective. And that’s the entry to sentience.”

Sentience?

Are plants clever? Maybe. Adaptive? Sure. But sentient? Aware? Conscious? Listen closely and you can hear the scoffing.

To feel alive, to have a subjective experience of your surroundings, to be an organism whose lights are on and someone’s home—that’s reserved for creatures with brains, or so says traditional cognitive science. Only brains, the theory goes, can encode mental representations, models of the world that brains experience as the world. As Jon Mallatt, a biologist at the University of Washington, and colleagues put it in their 2021 critique of Calvo’s work, “Debunking a Myth: Plant Consciousness,” to be conscious requires “experiencing a mental image or representation of the sensed world,” which brainless plants have no means of doing.4

But for Calvo, that’s exactly the point. If the representational theory of the mind says that plants can’t perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, and the evidence shows that plants do perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, maybe it’s time to rethink the theory. “We have plants doing amazing things and they have no neurons,” he says. “So maybe we should question the very premise that neurons are needed for cognition at all.”

The idea that the mind is in the brain comes to us from Descartes. The 17th-century philosopher invented our modern notion of consciousness and confined it to the interior of the skull. He saw the mind and brain as separate substances, but with no direct access to the world. The mind was reliant on the brain to encode and represent the world or conjure up its best guess as to what the world might be, based on ambiguous clues trickling in through unreliable senses. What Descartes called “cerebral impressions” are today’s “mental representations.” As cognitive scientist Ezequiel Di Paolo writes, “Western philosophical tradition since Descartes has been haunted by a pervasive mediational epistemology: the widespread assumption that one cannot have knowledge of what is outside oneself except through the ideas one has inside oneself.”5

Modern cognitive science traded Descartes’ mind-body dualism for brain-body dualism: The body is necessary for breathing, eating, and staying alive, but it’s the brain alone, in its dark, silent sanctuary, that perceives, feels, and thinks. The idea that consciousness is in the brain is so ingrained in our science, in our everyday speech, even in popular culture that it seems almost beyond question. “We just don’t even notice that we are adopting a view that is still a hypothesis,” says Louise Barrett, a biologist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada who studies cognition in humans and other primates.

We should question whether neurons are needed for cognition at all.

Barrett, like Calvo, is one of an increasing number of scientists and philosophers questioning that hypothesis because it doesn’t comport with a biological understanding of living organisms. “We need to get away from thinking of ourselves as machines,” Barrett says. “That metaphor is getting in the way of understanding living, wild cognition.”

Instead, Barrett and Calvo draw from a set of ideas referred to as “4E cognitive science,” an umbrella term for a bunch of theories that all happen to start with the letter “E.” Embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition—what they have in common (besides “E”s) is a rejection of cognition as a purely brainbound affair. Calvo is also inspired by a fifth “E”: ecological psychology, a kindred spirit to the canonical four. It’s a theory of how we perceive without using internal representations.

In the standard story of how vision works, it’s the brain that does the heavy lifting of creating a visual scene. It has to, the story goes, because the eyes contribute so little information. In a given visual fixation, the pattern of light in focus on the retina amounts to a two-dimensional area the size of a thumbnail at arm’s length. And yet we have the impression of being immersed in a rich three-dimensional scene. So it must be that the brain “fills in” the missing pieces, making inferences from scant data and offering up its best hallucination for who-knows-who to “see,” who-knows-how.

Dating back to the work of psychologist James Gibson in the 1960s, ecological psychology offers a different story. In real life, it says, we never deal with static images. Our eyes are always moving, darting back and forth in tiny bursts called saccades so quick we don’t even notice. Our heads move, too, as do our bodies through space, so what we’re confronted with is never a fixed pattern of light but what Gibson called an “optic flow.”

To “see,” according to ecological psychology, is not to form a picture of the world in your head. It stresses that patterns of light on the retina change relative to your movements. It’s not the brain that sees, but the whole animate body. The result of “seeing” is never a final image for an internal mind to contemplate in its secret lair, but an adaptive, ongoing engagement with the world.

Plants don’t have eyes exactly, but flows of light and energy impinge on their senses and transform in predictable ways relative to the plants’ own movements. Of course, to notice that, you first have to notice that plants move.

“If you think that plants are sessile,” or stationary, Calvo says, “just sitting there, taking life as it comes, it’s difficult to visualize the idea that they are generating these flows.”

Plants appear sessile to us only because they move slowly. Quick movements—like the nightly shuffle of my prayer plant—can be accomplished by altering the water content in certain cells to change the tension in a stem, or to stiffen a branch under the weight of heavy snow. Most plant movement, though, occurs through growth. Since they can’t pick up their roots and walk away, plants change location by growing in a new direction. We humans are basically stuck with the shape of our bodies, but at least we can move around; plants can’t move around, but they can grow into whatever shape best suits them. This “phenotypic plasticity,” as it’s called, is why it’s critical for plants to be able to plan ahead.

“If you spend all this time growing a tendril in a particular direction,” Barrett says, “you can’t afford to get it wrong. That’s why prediction does seem very important. It’s like my granddad said; maybe all granddads say this: ‘measure twice, cut once.’ ”

Phenotypic plasticity is a powerful but slow process—to see it, you have to speed it up. So Calvo makes time-lapse recordings, in which slow and seemingly random growth blooms into what appears to be purposeful behavior. One of his time-lapse videos shows a climbing bean growing in search of a pole. The vine circles aimlessly as it grows. Hours are compressed into minutes. But when the plant senses a pole, everything changes: It pulls itself back, like a fisherman casting a line, then flings itself straight for the pole and makes a grab.

“Once movement becomes conspicuous by speeding it up,” Calvo says, “you see that certainly plants are generating flows with their movement.”

By using these flows to guide their movements, plants accomplish all kinds of feats, such as “shade avoidance”—steering clear of over-populated areas where there’s too much competition for photosynthesis. Plants, Calvo explains, absorb red light but reflect far-red light. As a plant grows in a given direction, it can watch how the ratio of red to far-red light varies and change directions if it finds itself heading for a crowd.

“They are not storing an image of their surroundings to make computations,” Calvo says. “They’re not making a map of the vicinity and plotting where the competition is and then deciding to grow the other way. They just use the environment around them.”

We dismiss a plant’s behavior as brute mechanics—as if that’s not true for us, too.

That might seem to be a long cry from how humans perceive the world—but according to 4E cognition, the same principles apply. Humans don’t perceive the world by forming internal images either. Perception, for the E’s, is a form of sensorimotor coordination. We learn the sensory consequences of our movements, which in turn shapes how we move.

Just watch an outfielder catch a fly ball.6 Standard cognitive science would say the athlete’s brain computes the ball’s projectile motion and predicts where it’s going to land. Then the brain tells the body what to do, the mere output of a cognitive process that took place entirely inside the head. If all that were true, the player could just make a beeline to that spot—running in a straight line, no need to watch the ball—and catch.

But that’s not what outfielders do. Instead, they move their bodies, constantly shuffling back and forth and watching how the position of the ball changes as they move. They do this because if they can keep the ball’s speed steady in their field of vision—canceling out the ball’s acceleration with their own—they and the ball will end up in the same spot. The player doesn’t have to solve differential equations on a mental model—the movement of her body relative to the ball solves the problem for her in active engagement, in real time. As the MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks wrote in a landmark 1991 paper, “Intelligence Without Representation,” “Explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model.”7

If cognition is embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, and ecological, then what we call the mind is not in the brain. It is the body’s active engagement with the world, made not of neural firings alone but of sensorimotor loops that run through the brain, body, and environment. In other words, the mind is not in the head. Calvo likes to quote the psychologist William Mace: “Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your head’s inside of.”

When I first encountered the 4E theories, I couldn’t help thinking of consciousness. If the mind is embodied, extended, embedded, etcetera, does consciousness—that magical, misty stuff—seep out of the confines of the skull, permeate the body, pour like smoke from the ears, and leak out into the world? But then I realized that way of thinking was a hangover from the traditional view, where consciousness was treated as a noun, as something that could be located in a particular place.

“Cognition is not something that plants—or indeed animals—can possibly have,” Calvo writes in his new book, Planta Sapiens.8 “It is rather something created by the interaction between an organism and its environment. Don’t think of what’s going on inside the organism, but rather how the organism couples to its surroundings, for that is where experience is created.”

The mind, in that sense, is better understood as a verb. As the philosopher Alva Noë, who works in embodied cognition, puts it, “Consciousness isn’t something that happens inside us: It is something we do.”9

And we do it in order to keep on living. The need to stay alive, to tread in far-from-equilibrium water—that is what separates us from machines. “Wild cognition,” as Barrett puts it, is more akin to a candle flame than to a computer. “We are ongoing processes resisting the second law of thermodynamics,” she says. We are candles desperately working to re-light ourselves, while entropy does its damnedest to blow us out. Machines are made—one and done—but living things make themselves, and they have to remake themselves so long as they want to keep living.

I felt like an active life form, tendrilled and strange.

The Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela—founding fathers of embodied and enactive cognition—coined the term “autopoiesis” to capture this property of self-creation. A cell—the fundamental unit of life—serves as the prime example.

Cells consist of metabolic networks that churn out the very components of those networks, including the cell membrane, which the network continuously builds and rebuilds, while the membrane, in turn, allows the network to function without oozing back into the world. To keep its metabolism going, the cell needs to be in constant exchange with its environment, drawing in resources and tossing out waste, which means the membrane has to let things pass through it. But it can’t do it indiscriminately. The cell has to take a stance on the world, to view it as a place of value, full of things that are “good” and “bad,” “useful” and “harmful,” where such terms are never absolute but dependent on the cell’s ever-changing needs and the environment’s ever-changing dynamics.

These valences, Calvo says, are the stirrings of sentience. They are distinctions that carve out (or “enact”) a world in a process that 4E cognitive scientists call “sense-making.” The act of making valenced distinctions in the world, which allow you to draw the boundary between self and other, is the primordial cognitive act from which all higher levels of cognition ultimately derive. The same act that keeps a living system living is the act by which, as Noë puts it, “the world shows up for us.”

“You start with life,” says Evan Thompson, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia and one of the founders of the enactive approach. “Being alive means being organized in a certain way. You’re organized to have a certain autonomy, and that immediately carves out a world or a domain of relevance.” Thompson calls this “life-mind continuity.” Or as Calvo puts it, echoing the 19th-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, “Where there is life there is already mind.”

From a 4E perspective, minds come before brains. Brains come into the picture when you have multicellular, mobile organisms—not to represent the world or give rise to consciousness, but to forge connections between sensory and motor systems so that the organism can act as a singular whole and move through its environment in ways that keep its flame lit.

“The brain fundamentally is a life regulation organ,” Thompson says. “In that sense, it’s like the heart or the kidney. When you have animal life, it’s crucially dependent for the regulation of the body, its maintenance, and all its behavioral capacities. The brain is facilitating what the organism does. Words like cognition, memory, attention, or consciousness—those words for me are properly applied to the whole organism. It’s the whole organism that’s conscious, not the brain that’s conscious. It’s the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it’s not the location of it.”

A bird needs wings to fly, Thompson says, but the flight is not in the wings. Disembodied wings in a vat could never fly—it’s the whole bird, in interaction with the air currents shaped by its own movements, that takes to the sky.

What we model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition.

“Plants are a different strategy of multicellularity than animals,” Thompson says. They don’t have brains, but according to Calvo they have something just as good: complex vascular systems, with networks of connections arranged in layers not unlike a mammalian cortex. In the root apex—a small region in the tip of a plant’s root—sensory and motor signals are integrated through electrochemical activity using molecules similar to the neurotransmitters in our brains, with plant cells firing off action potentials similar to a neuron’s, only slower. Like the human brain, the root apex allows the plant to integrate all of its sensory flows in order to produce new behavior that will generate new flows in ways that keep the plant adaptively coupled to the world.

The similar roles played by an animal’s nervous system and a plant’s vascular system help explain why the same anesthetics can put both animals and plants to sleep, as Calvo demonstrated using a Venus flytrap in a bell jar. Normally, the plant’s traps snap shut when an unfortunate insect triggers one of its sensor hairs, which protrude from the trap’s mouth like sharks’ teeth. (Actually, the clever plant awaits the triggering of a second hair within seconds of the first before expending the costly energy to bite. Once closed, it awaits three more triggers—to ensure there’s a decent bug buzzing around in there—before it releases acidic enzymes to digest its meal. As Calvo sums it up, “They can count to five!”) Using surface electrodes, Calvo watched as the triggered hairs sent electric spikes zapping through the plant, sparking its motor system to react. With anesthesia, all of that stopped. Calvo tickled the trap’s hairs and it just sat there, its mouth agape. The electrode reading flatlined.

“The anesthesia prevents the cell from firing an action potential,” Calvo explains. “That happens in both plants and animals.” It’s not that the anesthetic is turning down the dial of consciousness inside the brain or root apex, it’s just severing the links between sensory inputs and motor outputs, preventing the organism from engaging as a singular whole with its environment. Once “woken,” though, the groggy Venus flytraps quickly returned to their usual behavior.

“Clearly,” Thompson says, “plants are self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regulating, highly adaptive, they engage in complex signaling among each other, within species and across species, and they do that within a framework of multicellularity that’s different from animal life but exhibits all the same things: autonomy, intelligence, adaptivity, sense-making.” From a 4E perspective, Thompson says, “there’s no problem in talking about plant cognition.”

In the end, Calvo’s critics are right: Plants aren’t using brains to form internal representations. They have no private, conscious worlds locked up inside them. But according to 4E cognitive science, neither do we.

“The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.”

After talking with Calvo, I looked around my apartment overrun with plants—at the pothos and bromeliads, rocktrumpet vines and staghorn ferns, at the peace lilies and crowns of thorns, snake plants, Monstera, ZZs, and palms—and they suddenly appeared very different. For one thing, Calvo had told me to think of plants as being upside-down, with their “heads” plunged into the soil and their limbs and sex organs sticking up and flailing around. Once you look at a plant that way, it’s hard to unsee it. But more to the point, the plants appeared to me now not as objects, but as subjects—as living, striving beings trying to make it in the world—and I found myself wondering whether they felt lonely in their pots, or panicked when I forgot to water them, or dizzy when I rotated them on the windowsill.

It wasn’t just the plants. I felt myself differently, too: less like a passive spectator, snug inside my skull, and more like an active life form, tendrilled and strange, moving through the world as the world moved through me.

“Plants are not that different from us after all,” Calvo had told me, “not because I’m beefing them up to make them more similar to us, but because I’m rethinking what human perception is about. I’m neither inflating them nor deflating us but putting us all on the same page.”

It was hard not to wonder whether, from that page, the story of our planet might unfold differently. The “E” approaches ask us to question what we are, how intimately we’re entangled with the world, and whether we can rightly see ourselves as standing apart from nature or whether the destruction we wreak is steadily diminishing our own wild cognition.

“Human nature,” wrote John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher, “exists and operates in an environment. And it is not ‘in’ that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil. It is of them.”10

Amanda Gefter is a science writer and author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Lead illustration by Deena So’Oteh

References

1. Gefter, A. The man who tried to redeem the world with logic. Nautilus (2015).

2. Pennisi, E. Plants communicate distress using their own kind of nervous system. Science (2018).

3. Tsikou, D., et al. Systemic control of legume susceptibility to rhizobial infection by a mobile microRNA. Science 362, 233-236 (2018).

4. Mallatt, J., Blatt, M.R., Draguhn, A., Robinson, D.G., & Taiz, L. Debunking a myth: plant consciousness. Protoplasma 258, 459-476 (2021).

5. Di Paolo, E. Sensorimotor Life Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom (2017).

6. Wilson, A.D. & Golonka, S. Embodied cognition is not what you think it is. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 58 (2013).

7. Brooks, R.A. Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47, 139-159 (1991).

8. Calvo, P. Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence W. W. Norton & Co, New York, NY (2023).

9. Noë, A. Out of Our Heads Hill and Wang, New York, NY (2010).

10. Dewey, J. Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology H. Holt and Company, New York, NY(1922).

How To Speak Honeybee

suddenly AI can be used to effect comms with otgher living creatures.  Any comms set the stage for enhanced barter.  animals are largely trainable, but obviously way more efficiently using comms.

Comms also allow way better training as well.

Comms with local coyotes and foxes allow for protection in exchange for secure food.  Thay changes out agriculture big time./

How To Speak Honeybee

Advanced technologies like A.I. are enabling scientists to learn that the world is full of intelligent creatures with sophisticated languages, like honeybees. What might they tell us?

BY KAREN BAKKER

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-speak-honeybee/

Karen Bakker is a professor at the University of British Columbia, a Guggenheim fellow and a 2022-23 fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

Her most recent book, from which this essay is adapted, is “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants” (Princeton University Press, 2022).

The waggle dance of the western honeybee (Apis mellifera), in which bees waggle their abdomen from side to side while repeatedly walking in an intricate figure-of-eight pattern, has been observed since antiquity, but the person who finally unlocked the secret of its meaning was an iconoclastic Austrian researcher named Karl von Frisch. The breakthrough initially earned Frisch a great deal of scorn from other mid-20th-century scientists, but also eventually won him the Nobel Prize.

Young Karl was known to skip school to spend time with a menagerie of over 100 animals, only nine of which were mammals. His most beloved companion was a small Brazilian parakeet named Tschocki, who was constantly by Frisch’s side, sitting on his lap or on his shoulder and even sleeping next to his bed. Together with Tschocki, Frisch spent hours out in nature, simply watching. As he later reflected: “I discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passerby sees nothing at all.”

Frisch began studying bees in 1912. He had a hunch that ran counter to prevailing wisdom: The bees’ waggle dance was a form of language. In pursuing this hypothesis, he was contesting two core assumptions of Western science and philosophy: that only humans have complex forms of language, and that insects were incapable of complex communication given their tiny brains.

Human verbal language is largely based on the noises we make with our vocal cords and mouths, the expressions we make with our faces, and the way we hold and move our bodies. In contrast, bee language is mostly spatial and vibrational. Its syntax is based on something very different from human language: the type, frequency, angle and amplitude of vibrations made by the bees’ bodies, including their abdomens and wings, as they move through space.

By buzzing and quivering, leaning and turning, bees communicate remarkably accurate information. Once a scout bee has found a good food source, she returns to the hive to inform her sisters. During the waggle dance, the bee moves in a figure eight pattern: a straight line while beating wings, and then a circular return without wing beating. We know now that the resulting pattern, which can be observed visually, encodes the direction to the food source relative to the sun’s position in the sky; the length of the dance is related to the distance the bees must travel.

“Miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passerby sees nothing at all.”

— Karl von Frisch

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Frisch decided on an ambitious experimental design: tracking thousands of individual bees in order to analyze the correlation between their dances and specific food sources. At the time, this seemed impossible, given that hive populations average somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 bees. But Frisch, through painstaking attention to detail and near endless amounts of patience, was able to prove his hypothesis: As a lead bee dancer waggles, she orients her body relative to gravity and the position of the sun. By making subtle variations in the length, speed and intensity of her dance, she is able to give precise instructions about the direction, distance and quality of the nectar source. In so doing, she teaches other bees in the hive, who use the information they have learned from the waggle dance to fly to a nectar source they have never before visited.

Frisch’s research progressively proved the astonishing accuracy of the bees’ communication system. In one of his most famous experiments, he trained his bees to navigate to a hidden food source several miles away, across a lake and around a mountain. This was an astounding feat, given that he had shown the site once to only a single bee. In another experiment, he demonstrated that different hives have slightly different dancing patterns. Bees appeared to learn these patterns from their hive mates. In essence, honeybee dance language has dialects, just like human communities.

Frisch himself was so amazed by his findings that he initially kept them secret. Contradicting prevailing scientific views, his findings demonstrated that honeybees possessed learning, memory and the ability to share information through symbolic communication, a form of abstract language. As he wrote to a confidante in 1946: “If you now think I’m crazy, you’d be wrong. But I could certainly understand it.”

Frisch was right to worry. When he finally went public, many scientists dismissed his research and argued that insects with such tiny brains were incapable of complex communication. The American biologist Adrian Wenner launched a challenge to Frisch’s theory, arguing that bees locate foods solely by odors, a theory that was subsequently proved wrong, although odors are important signals for bees. Eventually, Frisch’s results were definitively and independently validated, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973. The prize committee concluded its nomination statement by referring to the “shameless vanity” of Homo sapiens that refused to recognize bees’ extraordinary capacities.

Frisch referred to honeybee dances as a “magic well”: The more he studied them, the more complex they turned out to be. Every species, Frisch argued, has its own magic well. Humans have verbal language. Whales have echolocation, which endows them with the ability to visualize their entire environment via sound. Honeybees have spatial, embodied language: We now recognize some of the subtle differences in their body movements and vibrations, which include waggling, knocking, stridulating, stroking, jerking, grasping, piping, trembling and antennation, to name just a few.

The bees’ dance is still considered by many scientists to be the most complex symbolic system that humans have decoded to date in the animal world. Although many scientists initially asserted that the waggle dance should be referred to merely as communication, Frisch insisted on using the term language: Through a system of signs, bees exchange information, coordinate complex behavior and form social groupings.

Honeybee researchers following in Frisch’s footsteps have probed the magic well even more deeply. Bees make many other types of signals through nuanced movements, communicating through sounds and vibrations largely either inaudible to or indecipherable by humans. Moreover, by using computer software that automates the decoding of bee vibrations and sounds — vibroacoustics, as the field is known — researchers are now using algorithms to analyze bee signals. Their discoveries are as incredible as Frisch’s first breakthroughs.

Although it has been known for centuries that queens have their own vocabulary (including tooting and quacking sounds), researchers have found new worker bee signals, such as a hush (or stop) signal that can be tuned to specific types of threats and a whooping danger signal that can be elicited by a gentle knocking of the hive. Worker bees also make piping, begging and shaking signals that direct collective and individual behavior.

“Honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making.”

Bees have excellent eyesight and are capable (after minimal training) of distinguishing between Monet and Picasso paintings. They can differentiate not only between flowers and landscapes but even human faces, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for processing complex visual information. In two breakthrough experiments in 2016 and 2017, researchers demonstrated that bees are capable of social learning and cultural transmission (a first in Western science for invertebrates): When trained to pull a string to receive a sugar reward (a novel task), bees taught the new skill to their hive mates, demonstrating that bees can learn from observing other bees, and that these learned skills can be shared and become part of the culture of the colony.

A dark side of bee social life has also been uncovered: While honeybees are generally collaborative, accurate and efficient, they are also capable of error, robbery, cheating and social parasitism. They might even have emotions, exhibiting both pessimism and dopamine-induced mood swings that are analogous to human highs and lows.

As one researcher cautiously noted in a landmark study of a newly identified bee signal: “Communication in honeybees turns out to be vastly more sophisticated than originally imagined. Research is revealing … a collective intelligence that … makes one pause to ask whether these creatures may be more than just simple, reflexive, unthinking automata.”

Perhaps the most remarkable research is that of Cornell bee scientist Thomas Seeley, who has demonstrated that honeybee language extends beyond foraging behavior. For several decades, Seeley focused his research on bee swarming. Swarming is the way honeybee colonies naturally reproduce; a single colony splits into two or more distinct colonies, and one group flies off to find a new home. How, Seeley wondered, did the colony decide on their preferred site?

When Seeley first decided to focus on swarming, scientists knew very little about the phenomenon. The fastest bees in a swarm fly over 20 miles per hour, usually moving in a straight line toward their target regardless of the fields, water bodies, buildings, hills or forests in their way. There is no way a human can keep up with the swarm, much less keep track of several thousand individual bees to figure out which ones, if any, are guiding the rest. Seeley was interested in how the bees decided which home to select — a high-stakes decision, given that splitting the hive could cause the queen to be lost, and choosing an inappropriate site could lead to the death of the hive.

In the mid-2000s, Seeley convinced a computer engineer who was intrigued by the similarities between bee swarms and driverless cars to install a high-powered video camera at Seeley’s research site on Appledore Island, off the coast of Maine. Their goal was to create an algorithm that could automatically identify and track some 10,000 speeding bees at once.

“Communication with bees is an ancient human skill.”

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After two painstaking years, the algorithm finally worked: Powered by high-speed digital cameras and novel techniques in computer vision, it could identify each individual bee from the video footage and analyze its unique frenzied flight pattern. The algorithm revealed patterns undetectable to the human eye; decoding the diversity, density and interactions in these patterns led Seeley to label the swarm as a “cognitive entity.”

Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society. Seeley went so far as to claim that the collective interactions of individual bees were strikingly similar to the interactions between our individual neurons when collectively arriving at a decision.

Seeley’s findings bolstered the arguments of those who argued in favor of referring to honeybee communication as language. And by demonstrating that the “hive mind” was more than mere metaphor, Seeley also stimulated advances in swarm intelligence in robotics and engineering. Seeley’s research, predicated on digital technology (computer vision and machine learning) eventually came full circle: His findings inspired computer scientists at Georgia Tech to create the Honey Bee algorithm, which is now an integral part of cloud computing: In internet hosting centers (analogous to hives), it optimizes the allocation of servers (foraging bees) among jobs (nectar sources), thereby helping to deal with sudden spikes in demand and preventing long queues. In 2016, Seeley and his collaborators were awarded the Golden Goose Award, which recognizes apparently esoteric research that later proves to be extremely valuable.

Dancing Honeybee Robots

Thanks to Frisch and his successors, researchers have long known that bees react differently to distinct vibration patterns that act like signals. In the past few years, the combination of computer vision with miniaturized accelerometers (ultrasensitive versions of the motion-detecting sensors in your cell phone) has enabled scientists to decode the specific subtle vibration signals made by living organisms — vibrations that are vital to their communication but largely undetected by humans. Indeed, these technological advances have made it possible to analyze bees’ communication and activity over their entire lifespan.

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The next breakthrough — bridging what engineers call the “reality gap” between robots and living bees — is the creation of robots that accurately mimic these vibration patterns. Tim Landgraf, a professor of mathematics and computer science in Berlin, has devoted himself to this task for the past decade. Much of his research has focused on automating identification of individual bees and tracking their movements using computer vision and machine learning. One experiment analyzed around three million images taken over three days and tracked the trajectories of every single member of a honeybee hive — with only a 2% error rate.

Landgraf’s most innovative work involves creating robotic devices to communicate with honeybees in their own language. Working together with colleagues in the Free University of Berlin’s Center for Machine Learning and Robotics, Landgraf built a simple robot, which they christened RoboBee. Early prototypes “sucked,” as Landgraf put it: The bees would attack them, biting, stinging and dragging them out of the hive.

“Honeybee dance language has dialects, just like human communities.”

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The seventh prototype was the breakthrough. A statistically significant number of bees would follow the RoboBee’s dance and then fly to the specific location that Landgraf had coded into his honeybee robots. He had created, in essence, a bio-digital equivalent to Google Translate for bees.

Some of his robots’ commands are successful with the bees and sometimes not, and Landgraf still isn’t sure why. His current hypothesis is that a separate, prior signal needs to be issued first, like a handshake before a conversation can begin. His robotic bees may sometimes be emitting this signal merely by chance, and in those cases the bees in the hive will listen. Or perhaps a separate vibrational signal from a different device is also needed; one such tool, recently invented by Cornell bee researcher Phoebe Koenig, accurately mimics the “shaking” signal that bees use to activate behavior.

One day, he hopes, the RoboBees will be viewed as “native” by the honeybees themselves, able to issue commands and recruit bees to fly to specific locations by waggle dancing. Future robots might even learn local bee dialects, which vary with habitat. And this is only the tip of the iceberg; his work could enable the possibility of understanding how the colony itself processes and integrates different kinds of information, somewhat like a living distributed computer with thousands of tiny, interconnected brains.

Landgraf is now going beyond bee monitoring and trying to build smart hives that are two-way communication devices. Vibrational, acoustic and pheromone signals could be released to warn bee colonies about threats (such as nearby fields treated with pesticides, or approaching storms) or to guide bees to find the best food sources available.

Honey Hunters

As groundbreaking as these innovations might sound, Landgraf is not the first to have discovered how to speak to bees using vibroacoustics. Communication with bees is, in fact, an ancient human skill.

The earliest known vibroacoustic device, the bull-roarer, is regarded as one of humanity’s oldest musical instruments. Used in ceremonies by Indigenous peoples on all continents and in the Dionysian Mysteries by the ancient Greeks, it has a lesser-known function as a bee-hunting device. A bullroarer (turndun or bribbun to Australian Indigenous communities, kalimatoto padōk to the Pomo tribe in California) is deceptively simple: A long string or sinew is attached to a thin, rectangular piece of wood, stone or bone that is rounded at the ends. The cord is given a slight initial twist, and then the bullroarer is swung around in a circle. The resulting noise, caused by air vibrating between 90 and 150 Hz, is a surprisingly loud sound similar to a propeller. The effect is startling and palpable: a resonating hum in your bones, like standing within a giant swarm of bees.

Africa’s /Xam (San) use bullroarers to cause bees to swarm and to direct them to new hives at locations that are easy for humans to access. The /Xam word for bullroarer is “!goin !goin,” which literally means “to beat” — like beating a drum. The bullroarer is spun in tandem with a dance that puts the /Xam into a trance-like state through which elders call upon and guide the bees. (Modern beekeeper practice employs a simple version of this method, called tanging, to calm bees and direct them to a hive.) Long before Western science discovered vibroacoustics, the /Xam had developed a nuanced understanding of bee communication. Anthropologists speak of a “copresence” that the /Xam developed with bees, based on mimetic sound capacities.

The /Xam are not unique in their ability to communicate with bees. In parts of Africa, people searching for honey are led to beehives by a bird: the greater honeyguide (its Latin name, Indicator indicator, is a bit of a giveaway). Honey hunting is an ancient art; some of the earliest recorded rock paintings in the world show humans hunting wild bees. And the animal kingdom’s preeminent honey hunters are honeyguides.

“Honeybees can differentiate not only between flowers and landscapes but even human faces, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for processing complex visual information.”

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Honeyguides are one of the only birds (and few vertebrates) on the planet that eat beeswax. Rich in nutrients and energy-giving lipids, beeswax is a sought-after treat for the birds. But most honeybee nests in Africa are well hidden in tree cavities, guarded by fierce bees that can kill the birds if they come too close. Honeyguides — likely guided by their strong sense of smell — know where the bees are but can’t get at the wax. So they partner up with an animal that isn’t nearly as good at finding bees but knows how to get the wax: humans.

In hunting together, the honeyguides and honey hunters have evolved a subtle form of cooperative communication. First, the hunters make their special call, signaling that they are ready to hunt honey. In the case of the Yao hunters in the Niassa National Reserve in Mozambique, who were the focus of researchers led by Claire Spottiswoode at Cambridge University, this sound is something like a brrr-hmmm: a loud trill followed by a grunt. In return, the honeyguides approach and sing back to the hunters with a special chattering call.

The birds then fly in the direction of the bees’ nest, followed by the hunters. When the birds’ chatter dwindles and they stop flying, the hunters know they are close. They scan the tree branches and hit nearby tree trunks with their axes to provoke bees into revealing the location of the nest. The hunters then make a bundle of leaves and wood and set it alight just under the nest, smoking the bees into lethargy before felling the trees with their axes and chopping open the nest. As they fill buckets to take back home, flinging away dry combs containing no honey, they expose food for the birds. The honeyguides wait patiently, flying down to feed only after the humans are gone. Before the Yao hunters depart, they gather up the wax and present it on a little bed of fresh green leaves, honoring the contribution of the birds to their hunt.

Scientists have confirmed the claims of the Boran people in northern Kenya that they can infer the distance, direction and time to the nest from the bird’s calls, perching height and flight patterns. Spottiswoode also confirmed reciprocal signaling among the Yao: When honey hunters made their special sound, the probability of being guided by a honeyguide increased from 33% to 66%, and the overall probability of finding a bees’ nest from 17% to 54%.

We might expect the ability to interpret human sounds from trained animals like falcons and dogs, and even some wild animals like dolphins, but from wild birds? The sounds exchanged between hunters and honeyguides are also not the same across Africa. They are learned from elders, passed down from one generation to the next. How do birds learn to communicate with humans? We don’t actually understand this yet, but we do know that honeyguides don’t learn cooperative hunting from their parents. Honeyguide nestlings never meet their parents, as the species is brood parasitic: Adults lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, puncturing any host eggs they find to enhance the honeyguide hatchlings’ survival rate. Then the adult honeyguides leave. Right from birth, honeyguide hatchlings are equipped with sharp, hooked beaks, which they often use to kill any unfortunate host chicks that managed to survive.

So how do the honeyguides learn the sounds? Spottiswoode and her colleagues are combining digital technologies with traditional knowledge to find out. They have developed a customized app that enables honey hunters to collect data on their activities. Deep in the forests of the Niassa, an area the size of Denmark with few roads and no internet connectivity, Yao honey hunters are roaming the forest armed with handheld Android devices, earning income from Cambridge University as digital conservation research assistants, singing to their honeyguide companions as they search for bees.

Governing The Swarm

Proponents of smart hives argue that digital technologies offer the potential to enhance environmental protection in a partnership between humans, insects and AI-enabled robots. Smart hives could use sensors and cameras to monitor bees and provide them with information to guide crop pollination and avoid polluted sites. The same technologies might be used to harness bees to map zones too dangerous for humans to reach, or power swarm robots to support environmental conservation, or even help out with search-and-rescue missions.

As data accumulates, a twinning effect emerges, with some beehives now also existing virtually in digital bee world that mirrors the physical one. This may help turn the tide in our race to save not only honeybees but many other species as well. When gathering nectar, bees continuously sample from the environment, so who better to act as a sentinel for environmental risk? Bees and other insects have been successfully trained to detect a range of chemicals and pollutants. Decoding a large number of dances from a specific area could help evaluate landscapes for sustainability and conservation. It could also make pollination more efficient and provide insights into how to ward off the widespread, alarming phenomenon of colony collapse disorder. Bees could also be recruited as live bioindicators: surveying, monitoring and reporting the landscape in a fine-grained, inexpensive way that would be impossible for humans to achieve alone.

But these technologies also create opportunities to weaponize bees. Bees have a long history with the military, and recently they have become instrumental in some security objectives. In the United States, the military has been actively testing bee bio-detectors in antinarcotics, homeland security and demining operations. The mobilization of what military scientists call “six-legged soldiers” requires genetic and mechanical manipulation of the bees’ nervous systems, migration patterns and social relationships.

The Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, for example, trains bees to extend their tongues when they detect dangerous chemicals. As Jake Kosek writes in Cultural Anthropology, once trained, individual bees can be used in military monitoring devices. Trained bees are inserted into cartridges in monitors carried by soldiers. When bees react to, say, military-grade explosives, the microchip in the monitor translates this signal into an alarm. The trained bees live for no more than a few weeks, dying within the cartridge. A replacement cartridge is shipped to the soldier, and, according to the scientist responsible for the project, “you simply slip out one bee cartridge and replace it with another.”

“Technology-driven advances in our ability to understand how bees live and communicate should hardly be repurposed to turn them into living tools for conducting warfare.”

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Mobilizing bees to detect dangerous explosives might be beneficial for military personnel, but the manipulation and casual disposal of honeybees at scale should give us pause. Technology-driven advances in our ability to understand how bees live and communicate should hardly be repurposed to turn them into living tools for conducting warfare.

There are other ways of thinking about our relationships with bees. For traditional cultures like the /Xam and the Yao, communicating with bees is embedded in sacred ceremony. Honey is both a practical and a spiritual matter, both food and sacrament. This view is not limited to hunter-gatherers in Africa; the earliest Neolithic representations of bee goddesses from Europe are over 8,000 years old. And many of humanity’s oldest written texts celebrate bees’ divinity. Almost 3,000 years ago, the scribes of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a key text in Hinduism, recorded the “Honey Doctrine” — a theory of the organic, interrelated nature of life, wherein honey personifies cosmic nourishment for the luminous ground of being: “this earth is honey for all creatures, and all creatures are honey for this earth.”

To witness biohybrid bees engaging in reciprocal (if rudimentary) interspecies communication gives me a numinous sense of awe. To witness bees being converted into disposable, militarized sensing devices gives me a sense of dread. These two choices are emblematic of humanity’s relationship with nature. Will we choose dominion or kinship?

If we choose the latter, there is likely to be a great deal more for bees to say to us and for us to say to them. And they will not be the only species that humans engage in dialogue.

Forests Are Getting Shorter and Younger All Over the World

This is unsurprising and certainly not welcome.  Restoration of old growth refugia will not happen in our lifetimes.

What will happen is two things.  The big one will be global reforestration which is now well underway and expanding rapidly.  This by itself makes it all younger.

The second thing will be the implimentation of forest grooming.

All that will lead to protection of remaining old growth and the establishment of future old growth in combination with selective harvesting.

Forests Are Getting Shorter and Younger All Over the World 

The loss of the oldest, tallest trees makes forests store less carbon dioxide and diminishes the wildlife they can support A forest in Koenigshain, Germany. (Photo by Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images)

By Alex Fox

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

jUNE 2, 2020 2:27PM 

The world’s forests are losing their big, old trees, rendering those forests shorter and younger on average, according to new research. These old growth trees, which provide vital habitat for wildlife and store more carbon than younger trees, are being destroyed by a host of contributing factors, including rising global temperatures, climate-related disasters such as fire and insect outbreaks, and deforestation, reports Craig Welch for National Geographic.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/forests-are-getting-shorter-and-younger-all-over-world-180975017

The study, published last week in the journal Science, draws on more than 160 prior studies to take a comprehensive look at the erasure and degradation of the planet’s forests over the last century.

"It's not a shock but it's very sad," Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, an ecologist and leader of the ForestGEO Ecosystems & Climate Program at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute who worked on the new research, tells Nathan Rott of NPR. "We as a human society are hitting these forests so rapidly with so many different changes that they can't keep up."

The international team of more than 20 researchers from more than a dozen institutions conducted an exhaustive survey of existing studies that looked at forest loss and combined those results with satellite imagery and computer modelling to track forest loss from 1900 to 2015, reports National Geographic.

The team found that over the last 115 years, the world has lost more than one-third of its old-growth forests, reports Damian Carrington of the Guardian. North American and European forests, about which more detailed data exist, saw tree mortality double over the past 40 years, with the majority of those deaths comprised of older trees, according to National Geographic.

The change has not been directly caused by any one factor, though the Guardian reports that scientists estimate 12 percent of the total forest area lost since 1900 has come from human land-clearing. Climate change-related stresses such as drought, wildfire and insect outbreaks are also driving the death of old trees and the loss of forests, and they’re all predicted to get worse in coming decades, Tom Pugh, a scientist at the University of Birmingham and co-author of the study, tells the Guardian.

Because plants use carbon dioxide (CO2) to convert sunlight into food, some thought the grand human experiment of pumping ever-increasing quantities of carbon into the atmosphere might actually accelerate tree growth, according to National Geographic. But the world heats up, trees start to batten down the hatches to avoid drying up which stops them from making use of all that extra CO2.

Nate McDowell, a tree physiologist with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the study’s lead author, tells National Geographic it’s akin to “going to an all-you-can-eat buffet with duct tape over their mouths.”

As the world loses its largest, oldest trees, McDowell tells National Geographic the impact on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is twofold. “When old trees die, they decompose and stop sucking up CO2 and release more of it to the atmosphere,” he says. “It’s like a thermostat gone bad. Warming begets tree loss, then tree loss begets more warming.”

The researchers did find some locales in which the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may wind up increasing tree growth, reports NPR, but it’s a tiny fraction and not nearly enough to override the lost capacity of those forests to draw-down and store carbon.

Researchers not involved in the study unscored the gravity of its findings but sought to point out that the worrying trends make the world’s remaining forests that much more important.

Tom Crowther, an environmental scientist at ETH Zurich University in Switzerland who was not involved in the study, tells the Guardian, "if we can protect the forests that we already have, and allow them to grow to maturity, there is a huge potential for them to capture a lot of additional carbon.”

Another researcher who was not involved in the report, Simon Lewis, an environmental scientist at University College London, tells the Guardian, “the world’s forests currently slow climate change, and while future mortality trends could reverse this, the ideas in the new report don’t change what the world needs to do: stabilize the climate by quickly driving fossil fuel emissions to zero and protect the world’s forests.”

First Contact 1947 IS-BE Chpt10 A Lesson In Biology

This item is at least a stand alone and covers an area in which we are also comfortable with and particularly separate from the rest.

What we learn is that the creation of life forms became a business a long time ago.  In fact the narrative here is completely mirrored by our own biochemical industry.   At the same time our own evolutionary narrative is debunked as it should be once you understand the inherent self creation of the spirit or IS-BE and it is that which creates third tier matter life.

Again we are provided a narrative understandable in our terms.  This is what we naturally expect though.

First Contact 1947 IS-BE Chpt10

A Lesson In Biology


(MATILDA O'DONNELL MACELROY PERSONAL NOTE)

"My debrief was also tape recorded as a back up and to add clarification to the stenographic notes. I debriefed immediately after my interview so that everything that was said was still fresh in my mind.

When I recounted these stories to the gallery stenographer I was still reeling a bit.

The perspective on Earth history from the point of view of The Domain is very strange, to say the least. I wasn't sure if my uncomfortable feeling came from being dis-oriented, or if it came from being re-oriented. Either way, I felt unsteady and confused. Yet, at the same time, there was a ring of truth to it. I was elated and incredulous at the same time!

The stenographer looked askance at me more than a few times as she recorded the "history lesson" I passed on to her. I'm sure she thought I was losing my mind!

Maybe she was right. However, if my mind had been filled with hypnotic suggestions and false memories by the "Old Empire", as Airl suggested, perhaps losing my mind would be a good idea!

I didn't have much time to ponder my own, personal thoughts about these things at the time. It was my duty to get all of the information I could from Airl and pass it on to the stenographer as soon as Airl was finished. My job was not to analyze the information, just report it as accurately as possible. The analysis would be left to the men in the gallery, or whomever else was receiving copies of the transcripts. I also delivered a list of books and materials requested by Airl to the agent in the gallery room so these could be gathered and delivered to Airl. Each night after I left Airl, she spent the rest of the night reading or "scanning" the materials which had been delivered to her. The members of the gallery each received a transcript of the stenographic dictation to study, each looking for information that was of interest to them. In the morning after breakfast I reported back to the interview room to continue my interviews or "lessons" with Airl."

(OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW)

TOP SECRET

Official Transcript of the U.S. Army Air Force Roswell Army Air Field, 509th Bomb Group

SUBJECT: ALIEN INTERVIEW, 28. 7. 1947, 1st Session

"The origins of this universe and life on Earth, as discussed in the textbooks I have read, are very

inaccurate. Since you serve your government as a medical personnel, your duties require that you

understand biological entities. So, I am sure that you will appreciate the value of the material I will share with you today.

The text of books I have been given on subjects related to the function of life forms contain information that is based on false memories, inaccurate observation, missing data, unproven theories, and superstition. 

For example, just a few hundred years ago your physicians practiced bloodletting 188 (Footnote) as a means to release supposed ill-humors from the body in an attempt to relieve or heal a wide variety of physical and mental afflictions. Although this has been corrected somewhat, many barbarisms are still being practiced in the name of medical science.

In addition to the application of incorrect theories  concerning biological engineering, many primary errors that Earth scientists make are the result of an ignorance of the nature and relative importance of ISBEs as the source of energy and intelligence which animate every life form.

Although it is not a priority of The Domain to intervene in the affairs of Earth, The Domain Communications Office has authorized me to provide you with some information in an effort to provide a more accurate and complete understanding of these things and thereby enable you to discover more effective solutions to the unique problems you face on Earth.

The correct information about the origins of biological entities has been erased from your mind, as well as from the minds of your mentors. In order to help you regain  your own memory, I will share with you some factual material concerning the origin of biological entities.

I asked Airl if she was referring to the subject of evolution. Airl said, "No, not exactly".

You will find "evolution" mentioned in the ancient Vedic Hymns. 189 (Footnote) The Vedic texts are like folk tales or common wisdoms and superstitions gathered throughout the systems of The Domain. 

These were compiled into verses, like a book of rhymes. For every statement of truth, the verses contain as many half-truths, reversals of truth and fanciful imaginings, blended without qualification or distinction.

The theory of evolution assumes that the motivational source of energy that animates every life form does not exist. It assumes that an inanimate object or a chemical concoction can suddenly become "alive" or animate accidentally or spontaneously. Or, perhaps an electrical discharge into a pool of chemical ooze will magically spawn a self-animated entity.

There is no evidence whatsoever that this is true, simply because it is not true. Dr. Frankenstein did not really resurrect the dead into a marauding monster, except in the imagination of the IS-BE who wrote a fictitious story one dark and stormy night. 190 (Footnote) No Western scientist ever stopped to consider who, what, where, when or how this animation happens. Complete ignorance, denial or unawareness of the spirit as the source of life force required to animate inanimate objects or cellular tissue is the sole cause of failures in Western medicine.

In addition, evolution does not occur accidentally. It requires a great deal of technology which must be manipulated under the careful supervision of IS-BEs.

Very simple examples are seen in the modification of farm animals or in the breeding of dogs. However, the notion that human biological organisms evolved naturally from earlier ape-like forms is incorrect. No physical evidence will ever be uncovered to substantiate the notion that modern humanoid bodies evolved on this planet.

The reason is simple: the idea that human bodies evolved spontaneously from the primordial ooze of chemical interactivity in the dim mists of time is nothing more than a hypnotic lie instilled by the amnesia operation to prevent your recollection of the true origins of Mankind. Factually, humanoid bodies have existed in various forms throughout the universe for trillions of years.

This was compounded by the fact that The Vedic Hymns were brought to Earth 8,200 years ago by The Domain Expeditionary Force. While they were based in the Himalaya Mountains, the verses were taught to some of the local humans who memorized them. However, I should note that this was not an authorized activity for the crew of The Domain installation, although I am sure it seemed like an innocent diversion for them at the time.

The verses were passed along verbally from one generation to the next for thousands of years in the

foothills and eventually spread throughout India. No one in The Domain credits any of the material in the Vedic Hymns as factual material, any more than you would use "Grimm's Fairy Tales" 191 (Footnote) as a guide for rearing children. However, on a planet where all of the IS-BEs have had their memory erased, one can understand how these tales and fantasies could be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, the humans who learned the Vedic verses  passed them along to others saying that they came from "the gods". Eventually, the content of the verses were adopted verbatim as "truth". The euphemistic and metaphorical content of the Veda were accepted and practiced as dogmatic fact. The philosophy of the verses were ignored and the verses became the genesis of nearly every religion practice on the planet, especially Hinduism. 192 (Footnote)

As an officer, pilot and engineer of The Domain, I must always assume a very pragmatic point of view. I could not be effective or accomplish my missions if I were to use philosophical dogma or rhetoric as my operations manual. Therefore, our discussion of history is based on actual events that occurred long before any IS-BEs arrived on Earth, and long before the "Old Empire” came into power. I can relate part of this history from personal experience:

Many billions of years ago I was a member of a very large biological laboratory in a galaxy far from this one. It was called the "Arcadia Regeneration Company".  193 (Footnote) 

I was a biological engineer working with a large staff of technicians. It was our business to manufacture and supply new life forms to uninhabited planets. There were millions of star systems with millions of inhabitable planets in the region at that time.

There were many other biological laboratory companies at that time also. Each of them specialized in producing different kinds of life forms, depending on the "class" of the planet being populated. Over a long span of time these laboratories developed a vast catalogue of species throughout the galaxies. 

The majority of basic genetic material is common to all species of life. 194 (Footnote)

Therefore, most of their work was concerned with manipulating alterations of the basic genetic pattern to produce variations of life forms that would be suitable inhabitants for various planetary classes.

The "Arcadia Regeneration Company" specialized in mammals for forested areas and birds for tropical regions. Our marketing staff negotiated contracts with various planetary governments and independent buyers from all over the universe. The technicians created animals that were compatible with the variations in climate, atmospheric and terrestrial density and chemical content. In addition we were paid to integrate our specimens with biological organisms engineered by other companies already living on a planet.

In order to do this our staff was in communication with other companies who created life forms. There were industry trade shows, publications and a variety of other information supplied through an association that coordinated related projects.

As you can imagine, our research required a great deal of interstellar travel to conduct planetary surveys.

This is when I learned my skills as a pilot. The data gathered was accumulated in huge computer databases and evaluated by biological engineers. 195 (Footnote)

A computer is an electronic device that serves as an artificial "brain" or complex calculating machine. It is capable of storing information, making computations, solving problems and performing mechanical functions.

In most of the galactic systems of the universe, very large computers are commonly used to run the routine administration, mechanical services and maintenance activities of an entire planet or planetary system. 

Based on the survey data gathered, designs and artistic renderings were made for new creatures. Some designs were sold to the highest bidder. Other life forms were created to meet the customized requests of our clients.

The design and technical specifications were passed along an assembly line through a series of cellular, chemical, and mechanical engineers to solve the various problems. It was their job to integrate all of the component factors into a workable, functional and aesthetic finished product.

Prototypes of these creatures were then produced and tested in artificially created environments.

Imperfections were worked out, modifications made and eventually the new life form was "endowed" or "animated" with a life force or spiritual energy before being introduced into the actual planetary environment for final testing.

After a new life form was introduced, we monitored the interaction of these biological organisms with the planetary environment and with other indigenous life-forms. Conflicts resulting from the interaction between incompatible organisms were resolved through negotiation between ourselves and other companies. The negotiations usually resulted in compromises requiring further modification to our creatures or to theirs or both. This is part of a science or art you call "Eugenics". 196 (Footnote)

In some cases changes were made in the planetary environment, but not often, as planet building is much more complex than making changes to an individual life form.

Coincidentally, a friend and engineer with whom I used to work with at the Arcadia Regeneration Company -- a long time after I left the company -- told me that one of the projects they contracted to do, in more recent times, was to deliver life forms to Earth to replenish them after a war in this region of the galaxy devastated most of the life on the planets in this region of space.

This would have been about seventy million years ago.

The skill required to modify the planet into an ecologically interactive environment that will support

billions of diverse species was an immense undertaking.

Specialized consultants from nearly every biotechnology company in the galaxy were brought in to help with the project.

What you see now on Earth is the huge variety of life forms left behind. Your scientists believe that the fallacious "theory of evolution" is an explanation for the existence of all the life forms here. The truth is that all life forms on this and any other planet in this universe were created by companies like ours.

How else can you explain the millions of completely divergent and unrelated species of life on the land and in the oceans of this planet? How else can you explain the source of spiritual animation which defines every living creature? To say it is the work of "god", is far too broad. Every IS-BE has many names and faces in many times and places. Every IS-BE is a god. When they inhabit a physical object they are the source of Life. 

For example, there are millions of species 197 (Footnote) of insects. About 350,000 of these are species of beetles. 198 (Footnote)

There may be as many as 100 million species of life forms on Earth at any given time. In addition, there are many times more extinct species of life on Earth than there are living life forms. Some of these will be rediscovered in the fossil or geological records of Earth.

The current "theory of evolution" of life forms on Earth does not consider the phenomena of biological diversity. 

Evolution by natural selection is science fiction. One species does not accidentally, or randomly evolve to become another species, as the Earth textbooks indicate, without manipulation of genetic material by an IS-BE. 199 (Footnote)

A simple example of IS-BE intervention is the selective breeding of a species 200 (Footnote) on Earth. Within the past few hundred years several hundred dog breeds and hundreds of varieties of pigeons and dozens of Koi fish have been "evolved" in just a few years, beginning with only one original breed. Without active intervention by IS-BEs, biological organisms rarely change.

The development of an animal like the 'duck-billed platypus' required a lot of very clever engineering to combine the body of a beaver with the bill of a duck and make a mammal that lays eggs. Undoubtedly, some wealthy client placed a "special order" for it as a gift or curious amusement. I am sure the laboratory of some biotechnical company worked on it for years to make it a self-replicating life form!

The notion that the creation of any life form could have resulted from a coincidental chemical interaction moldering up from some primordial ooze is beyond absurdity! Factually, some organisms on Earth, such as Proteobacteria, 201 (Footnote) are modifications of a Phylum 202 (Footnote) designed primarily for "Star Type 3, Class C" planets. In other words, The Domain designation for a

planet with an anaerobic atmosphere nearest a large, intensely hot blue star, 203 (Footnote) such as those in the constellation of Orion's Belt in this galaxy.

Creating life forms is very complex, highly technical work for IS-BEs who specialize in this field.

Genetic anomalies are very baffling to Earth biologists who have had their memory erased. Unfortunately, the false memory implantations of the "Old Empire" prevent Earth scientists from observing obvious anomalies.

The greatest technical challenge of biological organisms was the invention of self-regeneration, or sexual reproduction. It was invented as the solution to the problem of having to continually manufacture replacement creatures for those that had been destroyed and eaten by other creatures. 

Planetary governments did not want to keep buying replacement animals.

The idea was contrived trillions of years ago as a result of a conference held to resolve arguments between the disputing vested interests within the biotechnology industry. The infamous "Council of Yuhmi-Krum" was responsible for coordinating creature production. 204 (Footnote)

A compromise was reached, after certain members of the Council were strategically bribed or murdered, to author an agreement which resulted in the biological phenomenon which we now call the "food chain".

The idea that a creature would need to consume the body of another life form as an energy source was offered as a solution by one of the biggest companies in the biological engineering business. They specialized in creating insects and flowering plants.

The connection between the two is obvious. Nearly every flowering plant requires a symbiotic relationship with an insect in order to propagate. The reason is obvious:

both the bugs and the flowers were created by the same company. Unfortunately, this same company also had a division which created parasites and bacteria.

The name of the company roughly translated into English would be "Bugs & Blossoms" . They wanted to justify the fact that the only valid purpose of the parasitic creatures they manufactured was to aid the decomposition of organic material. There was a very limited market for such creatures at that time.

In order to expand their business they hired a big public relations firm and a powerful group of political lobbyists to glorify the idea that life forms should feed from other life forms. They invented a "scientific theory" to use as a promotion gimmick. The theory was that all creatures needed to have "food" as a source of energy. Before that, none of the life forms being manufactured required any external energy. Animals did not eat other animals for food, but consumed sunlight, minerals or vegetable matter only.

Of course, "Bugs & Blossoms" went into the business of designing and manufacturing carnivores. Before long, so many animals were being eaten as food that the problem of replenishing them became very difficult. As a 'solution', "Bugs & Blossoms" proposed, with the help of some strategically placed bribes in high places, that other companies begin using 'sexual reproduction' as the basis for replenishing life-forms. "Bugs & Blossoms" was the first company to develop blueprints for sexual

reproduction, of course.

As expected, the patent licenses for the biological engineering process 205 (Footnote) required to implant stimulus-response mating, cellular division and preprogrammed growth patterns for self-regenerating animals were owned by "Bugs & Blossoms" too.

Through the next few million years laws were passed that required that these programs be purchased by the other biological technology companies. These were required to be imprinted into the cellular design of all existing life-forms. It became a very expensive undertaking for other biotechnology companies to make such an awkward, and impractical idea work.

This led to the corruption and downfall of the entire industry. Ultimately, the 'food and sex' idea

completely ruined the bio-technology industry, including "Bugs & Blossoms". The entire industry faded away as the market for manufactured life forms disappeared.

Consequently, when a species became extinct, there is no way to replace them because the technology of creating new life forms has been lost. Obviously, none of this technology was ever known on Earth, and probably never will be.

There are still computer files on some planets far from here which record the procedures for biological engineering. Possibly the laboratories and computers still exist somewhere. However, there is no one around doing anything with them. Therefore, you can understand why it is so important for The Domain to protect the dwindling number of creatures left on Earth.

The core concept behind 'sexual reproduction' technology was the invention of a chemical/electronic interaction called "cyclical stimulus-response generators". 206 (Footnote)

This is an programmed genetic mechanism which causes a seemingly spontaneous, recurring impulse to reproduce. The same technique was later adapted and applied to biological flesh bodies, including Homo Sapiens.

Another important mechanism used in the reproductive process, especially with Homo Sapiens type bodies, is the implantation of a "chemical-electrical trigger" mechanism 207 (Footnote) in the body. 

The "trigger" which attracts IS-BEs to inhabit a human body, or any kind of "flesh body", is the use of an artificially imprinted electronic wave which uses "aesthetic pain" to attract the IS-BE.

Every trap in the universe, including those used to capture IS-BEs who remain free, is "baited" with an aesthetic electronic wave. The sensations caused by the aesthetic wavelength are more attractive to an IS-BE than any other sensation. When the electronic waves of pain and beauty are combined together, this causes the IS-BE to get "stuck" in the body.

The "reproductive trigger" used for lesser life forms, such as cattle and other mammals, is triggered by chemicals emitted from the scent glands, combined with reproductive chemical-electrical impulses stimulated by testosterone, or estrogen. 208 (Footnote)

These are also interactive with nutrition levels which cause the life form to reproduce more when deprived of food sources. Starvation promoted reproductive activity as a means of perpetuating survival through future regenerations, when the current organism fails to survive. These fundamental principles have been applied throughout all species of life.

The debilitating impact and addiction to the "sexual aesthetic-pain" electronic wave 209 (Footnote) is the reason that the ruling class of The Domain do not inhabit flesh bodies. This is also why officers of The Domain Forces only use doll bodies. This wave has proven to be the most effective trapping device ever created in the history of the universe, as far as I know.

The civilizations of The Domain and the "Old Empire" both depend on this device to "recruit" and maintain a work force of IS-BEs who inhabit flesh bodies on planets and installations. These IS-BEs are the "working class" beings who do all of the slavish, manual, undesirable work on planets.

As I mentioned, there is a very highly regimented and fixed hierarchy or "class system" for all IS-BEs

throughout the "Old Empire", and The Domain, as follows: 

The highest class are "free" IS-BEs. That is, they are not restricted to the use of any type of body and may come and go at will, provided that they do not destroy or interfere with the social, economic or political structure.

Below this class are many strata of "limited" IS-BEs who may or may not use a body from time to time.

Limitations are imposed on each IS-BE regarding range of power, ability and mobility they can exercise.

Below these are the "doll body" classes, to which I belong. Nearly all space officers and crew members of space craft are required to travel through intergalactic space. Therefore, they are each equipped with a body manufactured from light weight, durable materials.

Various body types have been designed to facilitate specialized functions. Some bodies have accessories, such as interchangeable tools or apparatus for activities such as maintenance, mining, chemical management, navigation, and so forth. There are many gradations of this body type which also serve as an "insignia" of rank.

Below these are the soldier class. The soldiers are equipped with a myriad of weapons, and specialized armaments designed to detect, combat and overwhelm any imaginable foe. Some soldiers are issued mechanical bodies. Most soldiers are merely remote controlled robots with no class designation.

The lower classes are limited to "flesh bodies". Of course, it is not possible for these to travel through

space for obvious reasons. Fundamentally, flesh bodies are far too fragile to endure the stresses of gravity, temperature extremes, radiation exposure, atmospheric chemicals and the vacuum of space. 

There are also the obvious logistical inconveniences of food, defecation, sleep, atmospheric elements, and air pressure required by flesh bodies, that doll bodies do not require.

Most flesh bodies will suffocate in only a few minutes without a specific combination of atmospheric chemicals.

After 2 or 3 days the bacteria which live internally and externally on the body cause severe odors to be emitted. Odors of any kind are not acceptable in a space vessel.

Flesh can tolerate only a very limited spectrum of temperatures, whereas in space the contrast of temperatures may vary hundreds of degrees within seconds. Of course flesh bodies are utterly useless for military duty. A single shot from a hand-held, electronic blast gun instantly turns a flesh body into a noxious vapor cloud.

IS-BEs who inhabit flesh bodies have lost much of their native ability and power. Although it is theoretically possible to regain or rehabilitate these abilities, no practical means has been discovered or authorized by The Domain.

Even though space craft of The Domain travel trillions of "light years" in a single day, 210 (Footnote) the time required to traverse the space between galaxies is significant, not to mention the length of time to complete just one set of mission orders, which may require thousands of years. 

Biological flesh bodies live for only a very short time -- only 60 to 150 years, at most -- whereas doll bodies can be re-used and repaired almost indefinitely.

The first development of biological bodies began in this universe about seventy-four trillion years ago. It rapidly became a fad for IS-BEs to create and inhabit various types of bodies for an assortment of nefarious reasons: especially for amusement, this is to experience various physical sensations vicariously through the body.

Since that time there has been a continuing "deevolution" in the relationship of IS-BEs to bodies. As

IS-BEs continued to play around with these bodies, certain tricks were introduced to cause IS-BEs to get trapped inside a body so they were unable to leave again.

This was done primarily by making bodies that appeared sturdy, but were actually very fragile. An IS-BE, using their natural power to create energy, accidentally injured a body when contacting it. The IS-BE was remorseful about having injured this fragile body. The next time they encountered a body they began to be "careful" with them. In so doing, the IS-BE would withdraw or minimize their own power so as not to injure the body. A very long and treacherous history of this kind of trickery, combined with similar misadventures eventually resulted in a large number of IS-BEs becoming permanently trapped in bodies.

Of course this became a profitable enterprise for some IS-BEs who took advantage of this situation to make slaves of others. The resulting enslavement progressed over trillions of years, and continues today.

Ultimately the dwindling ability of IS-BEs to maintain a personal state of operational freedom and ability to create energy resulted in the vast and carefully guarded hierarchy or class system. Using bodies as a symbol of each class is used throughout the "Old Empire", as well as The Domain.

The vast majority of IS-BEs throughout the galaxies of this universe inhabit some form of flesh body. The structure, appearance, operation and habitat of these bodies vary according to the gravity, atmosphere, and climatic conditions of the planet they inhabit. Body types are predetermined largely by the type and size of the star around which the planet revolves, the distance from the star, the geological, as well as the atmospheric components of the planet.

On the average, these stars and planets fall into gradients of classification which are fairly standard

throughout the universe. For example, Earth is identified, roughly, as a "Sun Type 12, Class 7 planet".

That is a heavy gravity, nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere planet, 211 (Footnote) with biological life-forms, inproximity to a single, yellow, medium-size, low radiation  sun or "Type 12 star". The proper

designations are difficult to translate accurately due to the extreme limitations of astronomical nomenclature in the English language.

There are as many varieties of life forms as there are grains of sands on the beach. You can imagine how many different creatures and types of bodies have been manufactured by the millions of companies such as "Bugs & Blossoms" for all of the myriad planetary systems during the course of seventy-four trillion years!"

(MATILDA O'DONNELL MACELROY PERSONAL NOTE)

"When Airl finished telling me this "story", there was a long, silent pause while I muddled through all this in my mind. Had Airl been reading science fiction books and fantasy stories during the night? Why would she tell me something so incredibly far-fetched? If there had not been a 40 inch tall alien, with gray "skin", and three fingers on each hand and foot sitting directly across from me, I would not have believed a single word of it!

In retrospect, over the 60 years since Airl gave me this information, Earth doctors have begun to develop some of the biological engineering technology that Airl told me about right here on Earth. Heart bypasses, cloning, test tube babies, organ transplants, plastic surgery, genes, chromosomes, and so forth.

One thing is very sure: I have never looked at a bug or flower the same way since then, not to mention my religious belief in Genesis