Ecologist: Popular accounts of subterranean mycorrhizal networks frequently claim that mature trees actively sacrifice carbon reserves to nurture unrelated seedlings through cooperative underground fungal links. However, isotopic tracing reveals that fungi strictly regulate carbon-nutrient exchanges to maximize their own metabolic fitness, withholding resources when exchange rates are disadvantageous. Furthermore, seedlings receive carbon only when they provide surplus nitrogen in return. Thus, the underground transfer of resources between trees is not an evolved system of communal cooperation, but rather an incidental byproduct of self-interested resource trading among independent organisms.
In one concise phrase, what is the main conclusion of the ecologist's argument?
Answer: The underground transfer of resources between trees is an incidental byproduct of self-interested resource trading rather than communal cooperation / Inter-tree resource transfer is a byproduct of self-interested trading, not communal cooperation / Underground resource transfer between trees is not a system of communal cooperation, but the incidental byproduct of self-interested resource trading / Resource transfer between trees is driven by self-interested trading by independent organisms rather than communal cooperation / Underground resource exchange between trees is an incidental byproduct of self-interested trading rather than an evolved system of communal cooperation