21–30 of 188 posts
> And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil. > One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear. And terror possessed me then > And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" > And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! > You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."
"Scream" is a sensationalist word, it anthromorphizes plants. You might as well say you can hear them sing Chop Suey's lyrics when they get cut down: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit Father, into your hands Why have you forsaken me? In your eyes forsaken me In your thoughts forsaken me In your heart forsaken me, oh
Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare? If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well? Or there should be real focus in humane treatment and harvesting them?
Is this going to drive my food prices even higher?
It's not quite clear yet how the plants make these sounds, but the scientists suspect it is a passive process linked to cavitation. This is when plants that are stressed pop air bubbles in their circulation system causing vibrations in the plant.
A situation the plants evolve specifically to avoid and signal to every other organism in ear shot that the culling is coming Isn’t that enough? My body bloats in a passive process after it stops functioning, I avoid that
"Scream" is a sensationalist word, it anthromorphizes plants. You might as well say you can hear them sing Chop Suey's lyrics when they get cut down: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit Father, into your hands Why have you forsaken me? In your eyes forsaken me In your thoughts forsaken me In your heart forsaken me, oh
> They may be filling your house with deafening clicks...
> These noises are at about the volume of a normal human conversation...
My very unscientific take is the noises are the result of a mundane mechanical process that is a consequence of the plant not having enough water or loss of water due to cutting, which leads to some cavitation bubbles forming. So it may only be as interesting as saying that your water starts "screaming" when it is being boiled.
Makes sense, it's hard to see see an evolutionary purpose to this.
We can now process it, so, as proactive evolution, it worked.
Before that,
> We know that certain animals are capable of hearing these sounds ... We still need to understand who is using this sound, what role does it play in the world, but it suggests many many possibilities // It's also possible plants themselves could react to these sounds, Hadany said. The same team found in a paper published in 2019 that plants can respond to the sounds of pollinators like bees. "They respond within three minutes by making sweeter nectar"
"Scream" is a sensationalist word, it anthromorphizes plants. You might as well say you can hear them sing Chop Suey's lyrics when they get cut down: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit Father, into your hands Why have you forsaken me? In your eyes forsaken me In your thoughts forsaken me In your heart forsaken me, oh
The start of the article is hilariously contradictory: > They may be filling your house with deafening clicks... > These noises are at about the volume of a normal human conversation...
Rephrased: "for the standards of a plant as we may have imagined it, those noises may seem deafening".
Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare? If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well? Or there should be real focus in humane treatment and harvesting them?
None of those concerns are new. Jainism is at least three millennia old.
"These results demonstrate the potential in studying plant bioacoustics, suggest that plant acoustic emissions may play an important role in ecology and evolution, and may have direct implications for plant monitoring in agriculture"
To me even the "suggests..." part is wild overselling. IMO this should have been in such a high impact journal only if they had actually succeeded in demonstrating the ecological relevance, by showing that the sounds are detected and acted upon by other organisms.