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If you are the type of person who keeps up on scientific studies, or even just reads the headlines about science on the news, you may have read about a study that claimed to show that trees can not only predict a solar eclipse, but also communicate it among other trees.
The paper said that tree-to-tree communication was measured via an increase in electrical signals that was in sync with an approaching eclipse. If true, this would be a major finding that indicated that trees could not only communicate between each other, but also that they had, at least on some level, ‘learned’ to detect an approaching eclipse.
Not surprisingly, this study resulted in plenty of news stories and articles discussing its importance.
The problem, however, is that when major claims are made that dramatically change the way a field of science thinks about a given topic, a lot of evidence is generally needed. The study in question looked at just three trees (and a couple of stumps), and seemed to have ignored other possible explanations for an increase in electrical activity.
Well, as one would hope would happen in situations like this, other scientists stepped in to analyze the paper and look for problems.
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Professor Ariel Novoplansky of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Dr Hezi Yizhaq of the The Swiss Institute for Dryland Environmental and Energy Research published a criticism of the paper in Trends in Plant Science. In it, they discussed a variety of problems with the study, including the fact that when the electrical activity was measured, there was a thunderstorm in the area with lightning strikes nearby.
In a statement, Novoplansky said:
“To me, this paper represents the encroachment of pseudoscience into the heart of biological research. Instead of considering simpler, well-documented environmental factors, like a heavy rainstorm and a cluster of nearby lightning strikes, the authors leaned into the more seductive idea that the trees were anticipating the impending solar eclipse.”
He want on to criticize the claim that the reduced sunlight during the eclipse may be the reason why trees would have evolved to be ‘aware’ of eclipses:
“The eclipse only reduced light by about [an average of] 10.5 percent for two short hours, during which the level of sunlight was approximately twice what the trees could practically use.”
This is a smaller reduction than the trees would experience on a cloudy day, which essentially shows that the reduction of light during most eclipses is all but meaningless to a tree. He went on:
“The electrical activity of trees is a real phenomenon but it’s still a nascent field of inquiry. The idea that variations in electrical signals, observable even in dead logs, might encode memory, anticipation, or collective responsiveness requires a few extraordinary leaps, none of which were supported in the study. The forest is wondrous enough without inventing irrational yet superficially fantastic claims of anticipatory responsiveness or communication based only on correlation.”
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In the end, this criticism is a good reminder that a healthy skeptical attitude is always needed when people put out new ideas, even when those ideas are published in scientific papers. It is also important to note that this criticism is not an indication that the original study should not have been done or published.
Instead, it is an example of the scientific method working as intended. One group of researchers makes a claim and presents evidence, and then it is tested (and in this case, found wanting) by another.
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