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Plants can detect sound

economist.com

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Re: Plants can detect sound

#101

Post by carapace »

There was an experiment where a scientist (I think it was Pask) built a cybernetic chemical machine in a petri dish. When the requirement to respond to sound was introduced, the machine grew "ears": spines of different lengths (that therefore vibrated at different resonant frequencies like the hairs in the inner ear.) (One of the most fascinating and terrifying experiments ever conducted IMO.)

Then there was the famous case of the program optimized by genetic programming that wouldn't function correctly on any but the FPGA it was evolved on; the program had adapted itself to idiosyncrasies of the hardware that were invisible on the level of the specification.

Just as Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm evolves an electric charge so evolution, uh, evolves whatever potentialities are there and adaptive.

In sum, duh. Of course plants are sensitive to sound. The contradictory hypothesis would be that there's nothing useful to plants in their soundscape. And doesn't that sound obviously silly?

Re: Plants can detect sound

#102

Post by Aerroon »

qlm wrote: post #54

Boquila trifoliolata appears to mimic surrounding leaves and the mechanism is currently unknown. One (controversial) hypothesis is that it has some sort of vision. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila

Plants having some form of vision doesn't that extraordinary of an idea to me. They can clearly detect light because of photosynthesis. Plants will also grow/turn towards the light. Ie they have a way to detect light. It doesn't seem that crazy to me that they could have some mutation that uses the information the plant gets from light.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#103

Post by bobbiechen »

mecsred wrote: post #100

I understand that this is probably my ignorance making me kind of an ass here, but my gut response is "obviously?". They're pressure waves, literally forces acting directly on the plant! Imagine reporting that plants can grow differently if you grab them and yank them around a bit every once in a while.

I think it's interesting to contrast to vision/light: similarly, there is a physical effect which we can perceive "from a distance". But vision varies wildly even among animals, and there are plenty of wavelengths of light that we can't perceive. I enjoyed a brief discussion of this in Andy Weir's The Martian (no spoilers here).

Re: Plants can detect sound

#106

Post by saberience »

kilolima wrote: post #38
patrickscoleman wrote: post #29

Just read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids

I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.

I thought Annihilation is more of a re-thinking of HP Lovecrafts story "The Colour out of Space". You should totally read it, it's fantastically creepy and clearly influenced the film.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#107

Post by skeaker »

pvaldes wrote: post #93
yojo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what the article said. Verbatim quote (emphasis mine): “…marigolds and sage plants exposed to the noise of traffic from a busy motorway suffered stunted growth” There’s a link in the article with more details on the experimental design: “The plants were grown from seed and allowed to mature for two months in the same space before they were divided into two groups. One group was exposed to 73 decibels of tr…

Evolving that system still does not have sense from neither a biological point of view, nor from a common sense. This came from the (incorrect) assumption than nature is quiet. Exactly the opposite to what we can empirically observe: The tallest, fast growing plants live in extremely loudly places called rainforests. Only the ocean is louder 73Db is a joke. Many of the animals here are incredibly loud. Common coqui f…

How do you explain the difference in growth rate under controlled conditions, then?

Re: Plants can detect sound

#108

Post by aspenmayer »

throwaway_ab wrote: post #42
noman-land wrote: post #14

This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

Sure, any interaction between our bodies and the universe can be considered an interaction of touch. All of our senses involve some form of matter/energy touching us. - Photons touching our retina cells... - Molecules touching our taste buds... - Air molecules touching our ear hairs... - Some amount of matter or electromagnetic energy touching our skin... - Molecules touching our olfactory sensory neurons... IMO we d…

“The map is not the territory.”

- Alfred Korzybski

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

Re: Plants can detect sound

#109

Post by pvaldes »

skeaker wrote: post #107
pvaldes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolving that system still does not have sense from neither a biological point of view, nor from a common sense. This came from the (incorrect) assumption than nature is quiet. Exactly the opposite to what we can empirically observe: The tallest, fast growing plants live in extremely loudly places called rainforests. Only the ocean is louder 73Db is a joke. Many of the animals here are incredibly loud. Common coqui f…

How do you explain the difference in growth rate under controlled conditions, then?

> How do you explain the difference in growth rate under controlled conditions, then?

There is not a lack of candidates:

Riding the academy game (plants must be sentient now, just because this is where the money is now), pure luck (moving more of the better genetics to one group just by random), cherry picking (The experiment results were publishable the 49th time, pffew), or giving your greyhound a helping hand without even noticing it. Choose one, there are much more other coming.

This single study is irrelevant because is negated by a million of empirical observations in the real life. We need to just stop for a minute and apply some old good common sense.

To start Tagetes and Salvia are two extremely popular plants cultured in every f*k roundabout of each big city in this planet.

Because they grow perfectly well in this (really noisy) conditions. How I know this? Because I like culturing plants, so I know what to expect. And this knowledge does not came from academy. Is achieved killing a few tons of plants by mistake like I did, and trying again. This is what this teams seem to be lacking. They are blind to the big picture. They just believe what they want to believe.

Moreover, Tagetes and Salvia are unrelated, representatives of two different families with two very different defense strategies. Why they would need to evolve the same sound sensors twice?.

There are tens thousands of counterexamples in the real world, against this single result (But then you don't have a career, of course).

Re: Plants can detect sound

#110

Post by skeaker »

pvaldes wrote: post #109
skeaker wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain the difference in growth rate under controlled conditions, then?

> How do you explain the difference in growth rate under controlled conditions, then? There is not a lack of candidates: Riding the academy game (plants must be sentient now, just because this is where the money is now), pure luck (moving more of the better genetics to one group just by random), cherry picking (The experiment results were publishable the 49th time, pffew), or giving your greyhound a helping hand with…

> Riding the academy game (plants must be sentient now, just because this is where the money is now), pure luck (moving more of the better genetics to one group just by random), cherry picking (The experiment results were publishable the 49th time) or giving your greyhound a helping hand (and faking the results). Choose one, there are much more other coming.

In other words, "they are liars," "they did not account for genetics and there just happened to be mutations that killed samples in one group," "they are liars," or "they are liars." To your credit, point 2 could have very well happened and I can't seem to find an actual citation in the article to determine that it didn't, but I dislike your reasons to doubt them on all other points. You could hardly trust anything at all following that logic.

Not to say that I doubt your experience. They certainly didn't test every plant in existence under every possible condition. I am certain that their results don't apply to everything.

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