Thinking outside the box

Neighbor Bill sent me a link to an article from the BBC Web site concerning the behavior of plants. The gist of the article is that plants will help other plants if they're related; strangers are ignored or competed with. An excerpt:

Some experiments have shown that if a plant's roots grow near to those of another unrelated plant, the two will try to compete for nutrients and water. But if a root grows close to another from the same parent plant, the two do not try to compete with one another.

Consider: If there is a large field of unrelated plants competing with each other by doing the equivalent of arm wrestling with their roots, could this be the source of an earthquake? Should we encourage botanists, rather than geologists, to do research on earthquake prediction techniques?