Trees May Not Anticipate Solar Eclipses, Calling Past Research Into Question
Solar eclipses have been shown to confuse animals and disrupt their typical routines, but how do trees respond to this phenomenon? A Royal Society Open Science study published in April 2025 asserted that trees can anticipate a solar eclipse before it takes place, but some scientists have taken issue with this idea.
A new paper published in Trends in Plant Science argues that trees can’t anticipate solar eclipses, claiming to debunk the April 2025 study. The previous study observed synchronized electrical activity in European spruce trees that was initially attributed to a partial solar eclipse in October 2022. The new paper, however, provides another explanation for the electrical activity: it may have instead been driven by a lightning storm that hit hours before the eclipse happened.
Read More: The Ancient Maya Used The Dresden Codex to Predict Solar Eclipses with Impressive Accuracy
Sensing a Solar Eclipse?
For the April 2025 study, researchers measured the electrical activity of spruce trees at a study site located in the Dolomites, a mountain range in northeastern Italy. They set up multiple sensors before the October 25, 2022, solar eclipse to observe how the trees would react.
This work specifically targeted the trees’ electrome, which encompasses all of the electrical signals and ionic currents within a plant. Looking at data picked up by the sensors, the researchers noticed that the trees’ bioelectrical signals started to synchronize 14 hours before the solar eclipse.
The researchers took this as a sign that the trees had prepared for the eclipse, communicating with each other in anticipation of the event. The results also suggested that older trees — which showed the greatest increase in electrical signals — had developed mechanisms to respond to a solar eclipse, almost as if they had retained memories of past eclipses.
Debunking Tree Forecasts
The authors of the new paper take issue with the assumption that the tree synchronization in 2022 was caused by the eclipse.
Ariel Novoplansky, the paper’s first author and an evolutionary ecologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the April 2025 paper failed to take other environmental factors into consideration.
It’s true that plants can anticipate imminent events that present a risk to their long-term fitness and communicate with neighboring plants, which is why they’re poised to forecast stresses like drought, shifts in salinity, and nutrient limitation.
“For anticipatory responses specifically, evolution is only expected to favor preemptive responses when the challenge is adaptively meaningful, reliable cues precede it, and organisms can detect and use those cues effectively,” Novoplansky told Discover in an email.
But the paper states that a partial solar eclipse does not produce a drastic enough change for plants to anticipate it. The authors found that the October 25, 2022 eclipse only caused a 10.5 percent reduction in light for two hours, which wouldn’t have been a real hindrance to the trees’ fitness, according to a statement.
Another oversight of the April 2025 study, Novoplansky said, is that it treated “synchronized electrome dynamics among nearby trees as evidence of information transfer/communication, when the same pattern can arise from concurrent, independent responses to shared ambient drivers.”
The paper also disputed the idea that older trees shared information with younger trees based on “memories” of past solar eclipses, since each eclipse has different paths, magnitudes, and durations despite occurring at periodic intervals.
Energized by Lightning
If the trees weren’t anticipating the solar eclipse in 2022, then why did their electrical signals experience a synchronized increase? The true culprit may have been a series of lightning strikes before the eclipse.
The paper authors reviewed lightning strike data from October 22 to 25, 2022, finding that 20 occurred within about 27 miles (45 kilometers) of the study site (18 of which occurred during the 14-hour time slot before the eclipse). Nearby lightning that struck on the night of October 24, therefore, may have activated the trees’ electromes. The older trees — being larger than younger trees — would’ve taken the brunt of lightning; this would explain why they displayed greater electrical activity.
Novoplansky notes that the April 2025 study was also limited by the small number of trees observed (three living trees and five tree stumps) at just one site. Future eclipse studies, he said, should attempt to replicate work across multiple eclipses, sites, and species and should consider other variables such as weather fronts, temperature drops, rain, and lightning.
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