Aphids

Aphids are born pregnant. Their granddaughters are already developing inside them before they leave their mother's body. This 'telescoping of generations' allows populations to double every week during favorable conditions—a single female can produce billions of descendants in a single season without ever mating.

This extreme r-selection strategy makes aphids one of agriculture's most devastating pests. They multiply faster than any predator can consume them, faster than any chemical can kill them, faster than any human can respond. Soybean aphid populations reached economic threshold in the U.S. within five years of their first detection. The speed of their expansion outpaced every institutional response.

But the aphid's attack revealed something remarkable about plant defense: plants talk to each other underground.

When aphids attack bean plants, the infested plant releases methyl salicylate into its roots. These chemical signals propagate through mycorrhizal fungal networks to neighboring plants within 24 hours—before the aphids can spread. Connected plants activate defenses preemptively, becoming repellent to aphids while attracting parasitoid wasps that kill them. The 2013 Babikova study demonstrated this underground messaging system using bean plants, showing that uninfested plants gained resistance simply by being connected to attacked plants through fungal networks.

The business parallel is information asymmetry and speed. Aphids win because they replicate faster than defenses can respond. Plants counter by building information networks that spread warnings faster than threats spread. The same dynamics appear in markets: viral threats (misinformation, short-selling attacks, competitive moves) spread exponentially. The response must travel even faster through existing network infrastructure.

Venture capital due diligence networks, industry associations sharing threat intelligence, and social media monitoring services all attempt to create mycorrhizal-style early warning systems. The question is whether the network can propagate warnings faster than the threat propagates damage. Aphids forced plants to evolve an answer: use the network you already have for defense, not just for nutrition.

Most corporate networks are built for nutrient flow—information going up, resources going down. Few are optimized for lateral warning propagation. The plants figured this out: the same mycorrhizal network that transfers phosphorus also transfers danger signals. Building parallel warning systems is expensive. Repurposing existing networks for defense is elegant.