The Douglas firs that Yuan Yuan and I had infested with western spruce budworm had dumped half of their photosynthetic carbon into their roots and mycorrhizas, and 10 percent of it had traveled straight to their ponderosa-pine neighbors. But what had me banging out an email to Yuan Yuan, now a professor at the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, was that only those pines connected by a mycorrhizal network to the dying firs, not those whose connections were restricted, were recipients of this inheritance.
