With biocommunication, it’s monkey flowers all the way down. De Moraes talks about the “arms race” of insects, plants, and viruses, each outsmarting the other and being outsmarted at turns. “Everybody is trying to survive. All of them.” She often laughs as she explains her findings, as if experiencing her own amazement at the results all over again. I get the sense she isn’t as wedded to this vision of nature as a battlefield, but it’s a metaphor near at hand in all of science since Darwin, so she uses it.
