FRIENDLY REMINDER
mrbroadway
THE👏WOODS👏ARE👏JUST👏TREES👏THE 👏TREES👏 ARE 👏JUST 👏WOOD👏
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys
This is very literally not true and I will not stand for this gross unscientific misinformation
A woodland is an entire ecosystem of which trees are a keystone species, but a long, long way from the whole picture. Above ground you’ve got the whole understory of ground flora, bryophytes, fungi, lichens, ferns, bacteria, invertebrates, mammals, birds and reptiles; below ground, it has a secondary ecosystem all of its own of soil organisms, invertebrates and micro invertebrates and bacteria and fungi and sometimes mammals.
And, something that is legit called the Wood Wide Web.
Basically, it’s a network of mycorrhizal fungi (essentially, every tree has a symbiotic fungus that works like our digestive enzymes, and helps it take water and nutrients in from soil) that grow long tendrils and so link all the plants together. But this network lets the trees do two things!
Firstly, it lets them share resources. Trees are very charitable creatures. If a tree in a wood is struggling, through disease or infestation or being in a shitty patch of soil or what have you, the other trees nearby will send it sugars and nutrients to help it along. If a tree is cut down, its surrounding neighbours will send sugars to the stump for years, helping it regenerate. Sociable things.
Secondly, it lets them communicate, I fucking shit you not. Trees have some resistances to fungal diseases or infestations, for example, especially if given time to get their defensive enzymes flowing before the problem hits. And if a tree at the edge of the Wood Wide Web is struck with such a disease, it will alert all the other trees in the network so that they can start producing the enzymes AND THEN THEY ALL SURVIVE. And when that first tree succumbs? See point one. The others do their best to revive it.
And trees are not just wood, in the same way that humans are not just flesh. Trees have heart wood, but also sap, xylem, phloem, cambium, leaves, bark, rooting material, and a shit-ton of enzymes including things like lignin, which is incredibly cool for several reasons; firstly because it was one of the biggest weapons in the evolutionary arms race (beetles and that couldn’t digest it, which allowed dead stuff to become, among other things, coal), and secondly because its chemical structure is almost identical to vanillin, so when you open an old book and get Old Book Smell it’s the lignin breaking down.
Coal and Old Book Smell. Thanks to lignin.
So in conclusion the woods are not just trees and the trees are not just wood. Please fact check before you reblog. This is blatant tree erasure.
sleepyowlet
