Posted on 02/20/2021 9:26:18 AM PST by DUMBGRUNT
Duke researchers have been studying something that happens too slowly for our eyes to see. A team in biologist Philip Benfey's lab wanted to see how plant roots burrow into the soil. So they set up a camera on rice seeds sprouting in clear gel, taking a new picture every 15 minutes for several days after germination.
When they played their footage back at 15 frames per second, compressing 100 hours of growth into less than a minute, they saw that rice roots use a trick to gain their first foothold in the soil: their growing tips make corkscrew-like motions, waggling and winding in a helical path.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Perhaps if he was fitted with a corkscrew foot?
Last Fall we dug an addition to the pond out in the pasture hundreds of yards from any trees. The hole was nearly 20 feet deep. At about 10 feet we found remnants of tree roots down in the clay and shale. No telling how old they were. I’m guessing this area was cleared over a hundred years ago long before statehood of 1907 when the Cherokee were moved here.
TREES HELP ONE ANOTHER THROUGH A “WOOD-WIDE WEB.”
When you walk in the woods, there’s a network beneath your feet. Parent trees nourish their saplings through roots, and with the help of symbiotic fungi, roots connect neighboring trees to share nutrients and warnings about threats.
https://watsonadventures.com/blog/fun-stuff/10-amazing-secrets-from-the-hidden-life-of-trees/
IIRC there was a discussion of this book on FR ...
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