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They're underfoot and underappreciated. But the roots of a plant may demonstrate the remarkable wisdom of crowds just as swarms of honeybees or humans can.
Three plant scientists now propose that roots growing this way and that in their dark and dangerous soil world may fit a definition for what's called swarm intelligence. Each tip in a root system acquires information at least partly independently, says plant cell biologist František Baluška of the University of Bonn in Germany. If that information gets processed in interactions with other roots and the whole tangle then solves what might be considered a cognitive problem in a way that a lone root couldn't, he says, then that would be swarm intelligence.
The decisions that emerge from groups of individuals have intrigued a wide range of researchers, for in some cases crowds show an eerie wisdom. Honeybees looking for a new home can collectively pick excellent nest sites even as individual scouts advocate for a variety of choices. And combining people's estimates of how many marbles are in a jar or what an animal at a country fair would yield in pounds of butchered meat often come quite close to the correct answer.
Plant life may exhibit collective decision making too, Baluška and his colleagues propose in the December
Trends in Ecology and Evolution. They urge researchers to look beyond the animal kingdom and into the behavior of plant roots for evidence of crowd wisdom. Information could pass among root tips via secreted chemicals, released gases or perhaps even electrical activity that connects "brainlike" command centers in root tips, the researchers propose. But however the information travels, the interactions could yield swarmlike decisions about where and how much to grow.
