Right, and I would say even communication is a strong word here. We are talking about automatic biological reflexes. Those are great, and mushroom signal exchange is genuinely amazing. But describing it this way continues in a concerning tradition of equivocating on terms with already strongly anchored colloquial meanings, to imply something beyond actual capabilities of plants and fungi.
I think it mistakenly puts forward an impression of intention, awareness, interpretation, conscious comprehension, agency, which are not there. And worse, I think some science communicators deliberately fan the flames of those associations. It might be that it's fair to call this communication and draw the line at language, but even communication here means something like blind signal transmission capable of prompting an automatic biological reflex somewhere else.
I think it mistakenly puts forward an impression of intention, awareness, interpretation, conscious comprehension, agency, which are not there. And worse, I think some science communicators deliberately fan the flames of those associations. It might be that it's fair to call this communication and draw the line at language, but even communication here means something like blind signal transmission capable of prompting an automatic biological reflex somewhere else.