We linked to this conversation with the author of The Light Eaters, and now see we can share this book excerpt published in The Atlantic:

On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroy’s lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.

The excerpt came to our attention reading this book review by The New Yorker’s Rachel Riederer which, like the book excerpt, makes you wonder what became of David Rhoades (we searched and could find no trail to follow, so it remains a mystery to us). It reveals the book to be more of an anthropological study of science than just a primer on plant communication:

A New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change

In “The Light Eaters,” by Zoë Schlanger, the field of botany itself functions as a character—one in the process of undergoing a potentially radical transformation.

During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, a researcher at the University of Washington started noticing something strange in the college’s experimental forest. For years, a blight of caterpillars had been munching the trees to death. Then, suddenly, the caterpillars themselves started dying off. The forest was able to recover. But what had happened to the caterpillars? The researcher, David Rhoades, who had a background in chemistry and zoology, found that the trees in the forest had changed the chemistry of their leaves, to the detriment of the caterpillars. Even more surprising, trees that had been nibbled by caterpillars weren’t the only ones that had changed their chemistry. Some were changing their leaves before caterpillars reached them, as if they’d received a warning. A shocking possibility presented itself: the trees were signalling to one another.

Zoë Schlanger recounts Rhoades’s story in her new book, “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.” In a research paper that Rhoades published on his findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society’s series “Plant Resistance to Insects,” he pointed out that the trees were too far apart to be communicating through their roots. This suggested a possibility so novel that Rhoades couldn’t resist an exclamation point in his otherwise cautious positing—the trees seemed to be using “airborne pheromonal substances!” That paper, Schlanger writes, “would change everything, and in a cruel twist, it would end his career. Because, back then, no one believed him.”…

Read the whole review here.