Are you smarter than a weed?

Today, I have a tougher one for you:

Are you smarter than a weed?

Before answering, I want you to hear from Ian Heap.

An Australian transplanted to Corvallis, Ore., the 29-year old travels the world with the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds.

I talked to him about weeds resistant to Roundup for a story on today’s Business page.

“We have about 900 scientists who import data into our Website,” Heap explained.

It’s all part of an effort by our species to keep with what weeds of many species are doing worldwide to compete with crops for space in the soil and sun.

Which raises a question: Without the benefit of telecommunications, research institutes or even brains, come to think of it, how do weeds manage to so successfully compete with our crops for space in the soil and sun?

Hold that thought a minute.

Heap said that although we tend to equate the words “resistant weeds” with “herbicide resistant weeds,” that’s wrong.

“No matter what we do, if we do it repeatedly, enough plants, weeds, will find a way around it.”

Which leads to one of Heap’s and other weed scientists’ favorite stories.

“In rice crops in the Philippines, they had been hand weeding barnyard grass for over 100 years,” he said.”What happened is the barnyard grass evolved to the point that it looked just like the rice plant at that stage.”

That left the weeders unable to know what to weed and what to leave.

As that renown philosopher from Mayberry, N.C., Gomer Pyle, once famously said: “Shazam, Goober!”

How did the weed figure that one out?

Rye grasses, pig weeds and horse weeds, including Ohio’s own mares-tail, are among the most persistent and widespread resisters.

“They’re all over the world,” Heap said.

And, like all surviving weeds, they have effective strategies.

“We know that plants produce a lot of seeds, plus they are highly variable,” Heap said. “They’re not just variable for herbicide resistance. Maybe their genome is not as stable, so they’re always mutating.”

This makes weeds a constantly moving target. And, in the grand scheme of things, they’re fighting crops we grow that are essentially fixed targets.

Heap suspects that weeds carry in their genes the memory of all the battles they’ve fought for survival in their much longer time on earth. It may even be possible for them to call on successful mutations from the past should they be needed again.

“To use a computer analogy, it’s hardware vs. software,” he said. “There’s a lot of hardware there that’s stored from generation to generation.”

And he’s pretty sure that’s not all.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface to see how complex the systems are,” he said. “People think of evolution involving changes over thousands or millions of years. But we’re talking five and 10 years” for some weed adaptations.

He then said five words about all these weed strategies I’ll never forget: “It’s a form of intelligence.”

Let’s pause a moment here to reflect.

Let’s assume that weeds and plants are one kind of living thing that has such adaptive skills or “intelligence” in its DNA.

Let’s think about the movements of fish underwater or birds on the air, as they adjust to the coming of a predator, a current or breeze. Might all those behaviors be part of the same kind of “intelligence.”

Let’s wonder about whether everything from whale and turtle migrations across the oceans to the ant turning the bank of our side yard into sand are part of the same thing.

All this points toward a deeper understanding of the mystery my wife for years has said plunges like a crevasse beneath the two syllables of the word instinct.

Let’s finish up with one more story from Heap.

Like the United States, Argentina and Brazil are fighting weeds now resistant to Roundup. And Canadians have kochia, a Roundup resistant tumble weed.

Heap said that at growing season’s end, when Alberta clippers uproot the kochia and send it tumbling across the prairie, “every time it hits the ground, it drops a couple of seeds.”

The next growing season, aerial photos can show the path of the tumble weeds by the pattern of kochia-plants that rise from the landscape.

That’s evidence that we are not the first species to plant crops in rows.