DailyDirt: Shhh! The Plants Are Listening!
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
People usually think of plants as deaf and dumb, but plants might be a bit smarter that we think. Sure, there have been science fair projects where plants grow and respond to music. But much more elaborate research has shown various plants can “hear” certain kinds of vibrations and react measurably. Here are just a few examples of plants listening to their environment.
- Researchers at the University of Missouri have detected plants creating more defensive chemicals when exposed to the sounds of caterpillars chewing. The scientists measured the tiny vibrations using laser reflections off leaves and noted that playing back other vibrations didn’t result in the plants synthesizing more defensive mustard oils. [url]
- Do plants really grow better in response to music? Mythbusters says it’s plausible, and a few other studies seem to support this idea. [url]
- Apparently, chili seedlings can detect who their neighbors are — and distinguish between “bad” neighbors such as fennel and “good” neighbors like basil. One proposal is that these plants can “hear” acoustic vibrations from adjacent plants… but that’s crazy, right? [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: biology, music, mythbusters, plants, senses, stimuli, vibrations
Comments on “DailyDirt: Shhh! The Plants Are Listening!”
The only downside to the realization of plant intelligence is the knowledge that some people are stupider than plants.
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Who signed me out?
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Your houseplant.
So it’s plausible they respond to birdsong too. In fact if they respond to music and caterpillars etc then it seems even more reasonable that they are tuned in to birds. The red cardinals in our garden favour certain shrubs of the same type for nesting over others, maybe it’s a mutually beneficial agreement. Ergo factory farming of plants is cruel – they need light, air and sounds of the outdoor just like we and many creatures do !! This confirms my previously held belief so It Must Be True!
exactly why i call vegetarians murderers, too...
to live is to kill, whether it is a tyson chicken stuck in a stack of 50,000 in a warehouse, or a happy farm-raised bovine, or a sheaf of wheat, or a carrot…
we kill them all so we may live… that’s life…
to say that animals are feeling creatures who should not be killed, is to ignore that plants have ‘feelings’ too…
IF a plant could communicate to us, or have big brown doe-eyes, don’t you think THEY would say: heh, don’t cut me down and masticate me, man ! ! !
so, we are left with being ‘breatharians’…
(a cult which actually exists which believes you can get all your nutrients, etc from breathing… i think they are dying out faster than they can reproduce…)
Re: exactly why i call vegetarians murderers, too...
Every breath you take is laden with microorganisms of various sorts, and your respiratory system is specifically designed to kill as many of them as possible.
Breatharianism is murder.
This entire planet is a living breathing organism , why is anyone surprised by this , ever heard the term food tastes better when the person who prepares is happy.. true story .
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Yeah but that is more management related. Happy workers perform better after-all. Unhappy ones are either distracted by other things or flat out don’t care.
Myth. Busted.
You left out the best part from the second one, when it turned out that out of the seven mini-greenhouses they’d set up for the test, the one playing heavy metal 24/7 had the biggest plants.