Tree networks invest more in dying members than competition models predict

Evidence

In her later mother-tree research, Simard documented cases in which dying trees in a network received disproportionate resource transfers from their connected neighbors. The network’s behavior at a dying tree’s node was the opposite of what competitive models predicted: rather than withdrawing investment from a failing node, the network increased resource flow to it in its final period. The dying tree was being supported by the community until its resources could be redistributed in the final pulse. The sacrifice was not of the dying tree — it was of the living trees, who invested in a node that could not return the investment. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 942

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader mother tree / fungal network material from Story 1, and to the archive’s ‘logic of last investment’ motif.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the primary citations for Simard’s dying-tree transfer cases to verify the mechanism.