In Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Patricia Westerford writes about trees and their effect on humans in their midst:

Westerford publishes these claims about vegetal communications to the mockery, initially, of the scientific establishment:

Westerford's efforts, and that of the novel's principal characters, are directed at establishing that vegetal communications as the collective agency of plants respond to their environs and shape them in ways that humans have refused to understand or even acknowledge. In Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves (2021b), the father teaches the twins, Aggie and Inti, the basic facts of vegetal communication:

Neil Abramson's Unsaid is a quasi-ghost story narrated from the perspective of a dead woman, a vet, Helena, who when alive was adept at reading animal behaviour. Helena notes how her favourite dog, Skippy, stares at her picture after her death:

To turn to a different theme, contemporary biomutation texts examine the ontological segregation of the human from other lifeforms and explore the possibilities of crossing this border. In Tania James’ The Tusk That Did the Damage (2015), a boy steals ivory from the elephants’ graveyard and finds himself metamorphosing into an elephant. In Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales (1996), a woman is transformed into a pig.