I'm a zoologist, for most of my academic life I have only really concerned myself with animals. Even within this very broad category I have tended to focus on the feathered and furry, although insects are pretty amazing. This is a natural bias that most people probably have, but recently I have been learning more and more about plants and they are truly fascinating.

Trees, and plants in general, to me have always been the start of a much more interesting ecosystem. They are the heterotrophic instigators of nature, using the power of the sun they can make sugars and this basically gets everything going. Above that they seemed uninteresting. However, I listened to a fascinating episode of RadioLab called “From tree to shining tree” in which the details of the Wood Wide Web were unravelled into my ears. These organisms are not solitary sugar factories but part of a vast interconnected system. Below ground all trees have a symbiosis with fungi, enabling the fungi to gain glucose from the tree in exchange for water and mineral ions but each fungi doesn’t just tap up one tree for this. Instead the hyphae of the fungi link different trees, often of the same species but sometime of different species, all together into a vast network. If you have seen Avatar this might ring a bell. This connectedness allows trees to share resources with each other in times of need; for example when one member of the forest is sick or when certain species are in leaf but others are yet to be.
 
But why would trees want to do this? Surely if your neighbour is sick then you will be able to grow above them and gain access to the precious sunlight that they are shading you from? Well yes and no, plants do compete but trees all do better in an intact forest: low wind speeds and cool temperatures lead to reduced evaporation and more water for all, as well as reduced risk of being blown over. But they don’t just give each other glucose, they can also signal to each other about potential risk, such as insect attack or disease. The key players in these networks are the old trees, those mighty majestic mothers of the forest who are probably 500 years old, and this has implications for forest management. There is a great TED talk about this by the researcher who discovered these networks Prof Suzanne Simrad called “How trees talk to each other.”

But it isn’t just this wonderful connectedness and cooperation that has blown me away. I have been reading the book Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and it is a beautiful and heartfelt insight into the lives of these organisms. The book details the wonderful communication systems of trees, from emitting ethylene into the air to warn the trees around them of browsing herbivores to using pheromones to call in the predators of the specific species of aphid that are currently feeding on the tree. The book details how plants can hear water, and grow towards pipes that are running underground. How the mimosa can actually learn not to respond to a stimulus (plants can learn!!). But the part of the book that I find the most fascinating is the way in which trees create ecosystems, by slowing down the air, securing the soil, then with the host of organisms that live on, with and around them they fix nitrogen to fertilise the soil and they release volatile compounds into the air to increase rainfall. All of these ecosystem drivers occur faster and more efficiently in primary, pristine forests; again this is something that needs to be taken into account in forest management.
 
I recommend reading, listening to or watching any/all of these links. Truly fascinating.
 
Hidden Life of Trees (Book) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate-Discoveries-Secret/dp/1771642483
 
Prof Suzanne Simrad TED Talk
ttps://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other?language=en
 
RadioLab “From tree to shining trees” http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/

So if you’ve read some of my previous blogs or follow me on Twitter (@alex_babbler), then you’ll probably be aware that some of my PhD research was recently shown as part of the BBC 2 documentary series World’s Sneakiest Animals. So I’m sorry if it feels like over kill to write about this again, but hey it’s not every day that your work appears on TV, let alone a BBC doco! Plus it will probably be the last time, so I’ll milk it for all I can!
 
But this post isn’t really just about my work; it’s about the other cool studies shown on camera. The thing that surprised me the most about the most about this series was the amount of the research that I had either seen presented at conferences or had been done by scientists that I personally know or that I had helped out with. This just goes to show how small a world the behavioural ecology field is, but also how many exciting young scientist there are currently picking apart the natural world (as all of the below research is by young academics). So below I will put a brief description of what is shown on the TV show, a comment on how I knew about it and then a link to the research (as it’s always far more exciting than the 5-10 mins of footage you’ll see on screen).
 
Firstly, the mimetic orchid mantis, whose mimicry is good that they actually attract more pollinators to them than the flowers they are mimicking. This work was done by James O’Hanlon, and I first saw it presented at ISBE in Lund 2012. He’s a great speaker, as shown by this YouTube video: LINK. Because the mantis is larger than and appears brighter than (to the insects they are predating on) than the flowers they are mimicking then they are a supernormal stimulus. It’s just a really cool bit of nature and very elegant research.
 
It appears at 4:09 in Episode 2 (The Hunger Game).
 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
 
Secondly, drongos stealing food from unsuspecting host species. This bit of storytelling was really a combination of a couple of papers. The first is a paper that I helped with and whose first author is Bruce Baigrie, investigated how drongos use sentinel calls to manipulate sociable weavers in a fascinating mutualism. The second paper and third papers, by Tom Flower, delves into the mimetic alarm calls that drongos use to steal food from their host species. Every time the drongos have appeared on TV it has always been with them shown as stealing food from meerkats, but the species that they hammer the most are the sociable weavers and then possibly the pied babblers. In fact, much of the early work was done looking at the dynamics of how drongos and babblers interacted.
 
It appears at 49:12 in Episode 2 (The Hunger Game).
 
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.short
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1711/1548.short
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=W6TB-BUAAAAJ&citation_for_view=W6TB-BUAAAAJ:ufrVoPGSRksC
 
Thirdly, the show describes how honeyguides parasitise other species to have them raise their own offspring. This is based on the work of Claire Spottiswoode, an amazing field researcher who splits her time between Cambridge, Cape Town and Zambia. Honeyguides lay their eggs in the underground nests of bee-eaters and when their young hatch they hatch early and then grow a sharp hook at the end of their beak that they use to kill their unrelated brood mates - very deadly. By doing this they can monopolise the provisioning of their host offspring. This section of the show also goes into the natural history of cuckoos, and who is a better expert on the subject than Nick Davies. So for the cuckoos I will recommend a great book that goes through not only Prof Davies’ work but that of his forbears and contemporaries.
 
It appears at 43:47 in Episode 3 (Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks).
 
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/09/06/rsbl.2011.0739.short
http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/4/792.short
Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature – Nick Davies
 
Lastly, as it was actually the final part of the series, my work on fledgling provisioning in pied babblers. My work shows that young fledgling babblers, who are amazingly incompetent fliers who are very slow to respond to alarm calls can get fed up to 9 times as much food by moving to areas of danger when predators have been spotted in the local environment. Adults feed the chicks to shut them up and move them to safety.
 
It appears at 51:46 in Episode 3 (Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks).
 
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1760/20130558.short
 
Other notable studies in the final episode of the series are on Kangeroos (that I think an ex-Cambridg classmate Emily Best) and bowerbirds (which is similar to the work of an ex-colleague Jess Isden), and fiddler crabs that I have blogged about before. It’s a very small world.