Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative • Hacker News Board

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#121

Post by thaumasiotes » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 2:34 AM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #98

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that line of thinking. But I still fail at giving a good explanation of that concept. Maybe it's intuitive for me due to having learned about cellular automata during my youth. I know I'm entering esoteric and new age territory but something tells me this can even be applied to phenomena like quantum entanglement. My idea is that if there is an information receivable and possibly even emittable by a biological…

The rule of thumb in evolutionary biology is if it has a cost and lasts through evolutionary time, it is beneficial. Because otherwise a similar organism that doesn't waste that time/energy on the useless thing/behavior will outcompete. Here's some odd and obvious examples. Religion has a cost (lots of resources and time are spent on them) and they have lasted through time, therefore it is evolutionarily beneficial.…

> A small percentage of the population is psychopaths, this has an obvious cost to communities, but the pattern has lasted through time, therefore has a benefit.

It has a benefit to individuals. A benefit to the community is not necessary.

> Likely it's for war/fighting/hunting.

This is a non sequitur.

Nothing is all cost and no benefit, and nothing is all benefit and no cost either. You don't see people arguing that vulnerability to cuckoos is beneficial to the birds they parasitize. The benefit is real (you don't need to bother recognizing your offspring, because recognizing your nest is sufficient) but the cost is so much larger (your children all die) that it's obvious the birds would be better off with the ability to recognize their own young (and/or eggs). They don't have that ability... yet.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#122

Post by yieldcrv » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 2:58 AM UTC

schwartzworld wrote: post #101

yieldcrv wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article didn’t, there are others that suggest there are signals to stressors that nearby plants react to. Even so, I can’t fly away from a tiger or bear. That analogy coupled with seeing that everything that can move, tries to move, makes me think plants would if they could. Sea anemones are very rudimentary and blind systems, and even they uproot themselves and “swim” away in the sloppiest way imaginable when a…

You can't fly away from a tiger or a bear, but a human screaming as they are eaten by that one night inspire you to run or hide from something you see as a predator. Your feet are not literally rooted in the ground. Also you have ears capable of hearing the noise created by another human.

And how does that alter my point, further described in the observation you didnt mention

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#123

Post by mixologic » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #102

stuaxo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love the new age types to get onto the idea that water screams.

There's already a bunch of new age types getting into the idea that water holds "emotional" values. IE, they claim that if you scream and have negative conversations at a glass of water, you can analyze the water and see changes to it that are negative, and doing the inverse (happy, positive conversations) makes the water "happier" and has positive changes. I remember hearing this at a seminar of new age things (I wa…

Spooky ~~action~~ belief at a distance.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#124

Post by mathstuf » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 3:59 AM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #90

I am astounded that no one has mentioned "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl (1949), in which a scientist invents a machine that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to humans. He discovers that plants scream when cut. You can read it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...

I think the BFG could also hear the screams of trees as they were being chopped down.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#125

Post by epgui » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:23 AM UTC

geoelectric wrote: post #106

bmitc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plants communicate distress using their own kind of nervous system: Model mustard plant uses the same signals as animals to relay distress https://www.science.org/content/article/plants-communicate-d...

Making this absurd for a sec to make my point, I think they’re just saying if the physical sound of an arm being cut off just happened to mimic a human voice crying out, that wouldn’t make it a sign of consciousness like an actual “Ow!” from the speech center. There’s a difference between a creature’s higher level response to a stimulus and just stuff that happens as a direct physical consequence of the stimulus. It’…

Literally the only difference between the two scenarios are the amount of complexity of the systems involved. You can describe either one in purely mechanistic terms.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#126

Post by papandada » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:39 AM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #90

I am astounded that no one has mentioned "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl (1949), in which a scientist invents a machine that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to humans. He discovers that plants scream when cut. You can read it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...

I wonder if this is the source of a Jack Handey joke: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#127

Post by noisy_boy » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:40 AM UTC

signa11 wrote: post #3

in this regard, i am always reminded of pioneering (in true sense of that word) work of jagdish-chandra-bose ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose ). it truly is fascinating !

He was also one of the earliest Bengali science fiction writers[0] having published a story in 1896[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_science_fiction

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose#Science_...

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#128

Post by bobbylarrybobby » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 5:04 AM UTC

eckza wrote: post #94

bmitc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also describe a human having an appendage chopped off in the same "mundane" mechanical way: loss of fluids, mechanical damage to nerves sending electrical pulses, etc. To some external observer, it's "just" a purely physical process. I'm not sure it's a useful description or perspective. The point here is that although maybe the mechanism here is just a mechanical process (although, what isn't?), the import…

When you cut off a human's appendage, the screaming comes from a voice. The voice comes from a sort of... consciousness. Which while we haven't exactly nailed down what makes one up, we are reasonably certain that it involves a nervous system .

It's still just physics and chemistry all the way down though. It's not clear that plants couldn't evolve something similar through a mechanism other than a nervous system.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#129

Post by throwaway290 » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 5:06 AM UTC

philipov wrote: post #51

svara wrote: post #30

Informative here meaning that you can deduce something about a plant's condition from faint sounds emitted by it. It's not implying that the plants use those sounds for the purpose of transmitting information. From the article: "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 implicat…

If you break a branch, the sound of it breaking informs you that you have broken a branch.

Like breaking bones and speech are both informative sounds emitted by a human from which you can learn something about that human condition. The difference between those sounds is more subtle than might appear at first

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#130

Post by dmn322 » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 6:06 AM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #98

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that line of thinking. But I still fail at giving a good explanation of that concept. Maybe it's intuitive for me due to having learned about cellular automata during my youth. I know I'm entering esoteric and new age territory but something tells me this can even be applied to phenomena like quantum entanglement. My idea is that if there is an information receivable and possibly even emittable by a biological…

The rule of thumb in evolutionary biology is if it has a cost and lasts through evolutionary time, it is beneficial. Because otherwise a similar organism that doesn't waste that time/energy on the useless thing/behavior will outcompete. Here's some odd and obvious examples. Religion has a cost (lots of resources and time are spent on them) and they have lasted through time, therefore it is evolutionarily beneficial.…

I mostly agree with your point however IMO the psychopath thing is not a great example because it could be explained as the incomplete or nonexistent development of something that is complex that is beneficial. I think the error is that we can’t necessarily know what the cost was. And the benefit doesnt necessarily have to be that big relative to the cost. I mean I’m replying to you and that me costs something, and what’s the benefit?

While the sounds don’t make themselves, they could be a side effect of something else… instabilities in the structural tissue, the plant straining to increase the movement internal fluids… who knows?

That said, I personally think there is communication between plants, or that at the very least it’s something like trying to mimic predator insect sounds. But could be that the vibrations themselves help move fluids around (as opposed to being a byproduct of something else that does)