So where is the device that I can buy and put next to my house plants so I’ll hear when they are thirsty?
They said you can use a simple $200 bat detector to record these sounds.
How about a $20 bat detector?
Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
151–160 of 188 posts
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the signal is being sent, you can be pretty sure that due to the intrinsic efficiency-maximization that biological systems perform then most likely the mechanism for detecting and acting upon it has been evolved by other organisms, especially for something as fitness-critical as stress.
Sometimes signal is just there regardless. If you hit your tissue hard enough, it becomes blueish for a while (a bruise, a hemorrhage). It may benefit something by accident, but a bruise just can’t stay as pink as the rest of you, due to the physics of the process. (From tfa) Plants exposed to drought stress have been shown to experience cavitation – a process where air bubbles form, expand and collapse in the xylem,…
> In other words, dry wood cracks.
How dare you translate academic technobabble to common tongue?
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#153So I could make a plant watering reminder system by listening to the ultrasound in theory
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#154Earlier 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…
I thought that was homeopathy.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the signal is being sent, you can be pretty sure that due to the intrinsic efficiency-maximization that biological systems perform then most likely the mechanism for detecting and acting upon it has been evolved by other organisms, especially for something as fitness-critical as stress.
Sometimes signal is just there regardless. If you hit your tissue hard enough, it becomes blueish for a while (a bruise, a hemorrhage). It may benefit something by accident, but a bruise just can’t stay as pink as the rest of you, due to the physics of the process. (From tfa) Plants exposed to drought stress have been shown to experience cavitation – a process where air bubbles form, expand and collapse in the xylem,…
The person you’re responding to is talking about other organisms (ie not the tree), which seems compatible with your observation here.
Trees might be screaming/bubble-popping into the abyss for simple physical reasons, but if cavitation is very important to some creature, there’s a decent chance that creature has evolved to sense these vibrations.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the signal is being sent, you can be pretty sure that due to the intrinsic efficiency-maximization that biological systems perform then most likely the mechanism for detecting and acting upon it has been evolved by other organisms, especially for something as fitness-critical as stress.
There is some reserach that trees already communicate indirectly via a network of fungi around their roots using sugars so it's not that far fetched https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
add to that
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-trees-support-... 'Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi'
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#157How about this claim: pieces of string when stressed emit sounds that are picked up by nearby strings. Should be investigate this claim? What does it mean that the world of string acts this way. For those that haven't witnessed it, I will describe a very easily constructed experiment to demonstrate this phenomena that I have discovered: first stretch a string tightly and then quickly flick it with your finger, stress…
Your comment rings true.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#158Informative 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 the signal is being sent, you can be pretty sure that due to the intrinsic efficiency-maximization that biological systems perform then most likely the mechanism for detecting and acting upon it has been evolved by other organisms, especially for something as fitness-critical as stress.
Conversely, perhaps humans evolved to not hear plants.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is some reserach that trees already communicate indirectly via a network of fungi around their roots using sugars so it's not that far fetched https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
add to that https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-trees-support-... 'Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi'
Interesting. Seems like the authors main contention is with the popularization of the concept that trees might be cooperating with each other instead of hyper competing as we historicallly assume via just natural selection pressures.
I’m sympathetic to their argument that we need to be careful how far we take the cooperation argument but I think they’re also throwing out the baby with the bath water. These authors are highly focused on showing the validity of the opposite point of view and so have conducted a meta analysis of the literature that is very, I would say, biased towards the exclusion of studies that show communication and transfers of chemicals between trees using mycorrhizal networks. I still find their meta analysis interesting but would caution people to also take their cutting down of the idea of transfers between plants using mycorrhizal networks with large grains of salt. They, as researchers, are also incentivized to kind of go a bit too far the other way from what they were arguing against (transfers between plants using mycorrhizal networks)
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#160I learned about this on Joe Rogan a couple years ago
"Joe Rogan: Plants Know They're Being Eaten & Feel Pain!"
https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/641t0b/researcher...