In April 2025, a scientific study went viral online for a particularly wild claim. A forest of Norway spruce trees (Picea abies) in the Dolomites of northern Italy appeared to rapidly synchronize their cellular-level electrical signals—known as electromes—in the hours leading up to a partial solar eclipse in October 2022.
If true, the discovery by the Italian Institute of Technology represented a possibly major development in understanding how plants communicate with one another. Despite many critics’ skepticism, headlines describing a “forest-wide phenomenon” of talking trees spread quickly across the internet. Now, one team of scientists believes they have a far more plausible explanation for the supposedly cosmic event in the Dolomite mountains. In short, the spruce trees were charged up with electricity from a recent thunderstorm. The evidence is laid out in a study recently published in the journal Trends in Plant Science—and the paper’s lead investigator isn’t mincing words about it, either.
“To me, [the April 2025] paper represents the encroachment of pseudoscience into the heart of biological research,” study co-author and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev evolutionary ecologist Ariel Novoplansky said in a statement. “Instead of considering simpler, well-documented environmental factors, like a heavy rainstorm and a cluster of nearby lightning strikes, the authors leaned into the more seductive idea that the trees were anticipating the impending solar eclipse.”
It’s not that plants don’t respond and even prepare environmental shifts—they absolutely do. They can sense shifts in light levels as well as underground factors like salinity and nutritional deficiencies. But these documented instances directly correspond to major existential challenges linked to clear predictive hints.
“In response to slight changes in light levels and spectral composition, plants can anticipate impending light competition long before experiencing meaningful photosynthetic shade from their neighbors,” Novoplansky and his co-authors write in their study.
They often do this by taking in pertinent information from their neighbors. However, a partial solar eclipse does not meet these criteria.
“The eclipse only reduced light by about 10.5 percent for two short hours, during which the level of sunlight was approximately twice what the trees could practically use,” Novoplansky explained. “Frequent fluctuations in cloud cover at the study location change light quality and quantity by much bigger amplitudes.”
Taking their debunking a step further, the team said that even if the reduced light was dramatic enough to induce a preparatory response in the trees, there was no way that they could have seen it coming. The partial solar eclipse in October 2022 was the 53rd in a sequence that takes place every 18 years, 11 days, and eight hours. The original study’s authors alleged larger spruce trees in the Dolomites exhibited larger amounts of electrical activity ahead of the eclipse, and therefore were attempting to warn their younger neighbor trees. But each eclipse follows a unique path, with its own duration and magnitude. So even if the older trees “remembered” a past eclipse, they couldn’t reliably plan for the next one.
As for any gravitational shifts that might give away the eclipse, the fluctuations during that time were no stronger than those that happen during a new moon. And then there’s the sample size. The first study’s authors only cited three living trees and five dead stumps—far from a large enough pool to derive reliable conclusions.
“The electrical activity of trees is a real phenomenon but it’s still a nascent field of inquiry,” said Novoplansky. “The forest is wondrous enough without inventing irrational yet superficially fantastic claims of anticipatory responsiveness or communication based only on correlation.”
