Do trees communicate for mutual defense? Yes. the first to find out about this is Davey Rhoades, a chemist and zoologist. In the spring of 1979, he took two groups of willow trees, infested one with caterpillars, and left the other alone as a controL Two weeks later, he plucked leaves from the trees which had been infested and fed them to caterpillars in the laboratory, He found that these caterpillars grew quite slowly. The surprising finding was that a diet of leaves from the non-attacked control trees nearby also caused the caterpillars to grow slowly. Both groups had apparently flooded their leaves with an unsavory chemical that discourage the insect's' growth. Rhoades concluded that the attacked trees had slipped the control group a danger signal, and that this must have been done by releasing a chemical into the air. Since then, other workers have achieved similar results with different approaches, Although no one has yet been able to achieve a definite proof that trees can talk to each other, the hypothesis has been attractive to draw other researchers into the field. Much more about the subject should be learned within the next few years