Vegans aren't going to have anything to eat now... /s In all seriousness, this is wild.
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Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
41–50 of 188 posts
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wild about it? Plants shrink when drying up and that collapses tiny cavities in their stems. It's only surprising that this sound can be detected so easily.
If you camp in spring near fast growing grasses or bushes, you can clearly hear them grow.
I've heard the buds on the end of a branch busting their way out of the dryer outer layer. It was calm. At first I thought bugs, but finally realized what it was. It was much harder to hear than beetles boring their way into a tree.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#43Does 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?
> Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare?
Whether or not plants suffer has no bearing on whether we should cause animals to suffer. Animal agriculture requires the use of more plants as animal feed than eating plants directly, so even if plants feel pain, we'd cause less harm by eating them than eating animals.
> If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well?
This says nothing about plant sentience and whether or not they suffer. You shouldn't conclude that plants suffer simply because cutting their leaves results in a sound. We know animals are sentient, we don't have currently beleive that plants are.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#44This must be april fools???
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#45Informative 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…
But you could use ultrasound sensors to monitor plants in agricolture... maybe this is why it got published in such a high impact factor journal.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#46Does 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?
I refuse to believe this isn't a troll comment.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#47Informative 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.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#48It'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
Maybe if the article said other plants could hear or react to the screams. What good would such a warning do for plants who cannot flee or fight back?
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#49Vegans aren't going to have anything to eat now... /s In all seriousness, this is wild.
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I don’t think we’re all that murderous at all unless we’re subjected to acute, severe stresses and/or maladaptive processes (usually early in life). I genuinely care about the well being of other living things and would hate to be in a position where I felt murder was necessary. I know I’m not alone.
Seeing how war affects soldiers, I suspect the experience of killing and witnessing death is typically very traumatic to humans. It appears that animal processing facilities also inflict trauma on many workers, so it isn’t only killing humans that can harm us.
We’re very good at killing, but I don’t think we innately like it or tend towards it outside of procuring food. Even then, not all of us eat animals.
Look at the lengths we go to hide death and murder when we do it. From war to agricultural systems, we go to great lengths to pretend it’s something it’s not so we can stomach what we’re doing or buying into. The closer we get to the individuals effected, the more reprehensible I think we tend to find it.
If we were truly murderous I suspect we wouldn’t behave in that way. I could be wrong — I’m very biased.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you camp in spring near fast growing grasses or bushes, you can clearly hear them grow.
How do you know what you are hearing is them “growing” instead of wind rustling them or insects moving around?
In my experience they have been distinct sounds of pressure and movement between plant fibres, in ways that the wind or insects wouldn’t or couldn’t cause in that setting.
If you lay still on a warm, quiet, still day in spring in a field or meadow, you might hear a lot of sounds you otherwise haven’t and wouldn’t expect. There’s a lot of activity. Sometimes plants will let some leaves or blades free after a seed husk finally breaks under their weight. It’s just gravity and pressure at work, but you’ll hear these things frequently.
This sort of thing reminds me of learning to find mushrooms. I had no idea mushrooms are everywhere until I started looking. They occupy all kinds of spaces in various seasons, dependent on a rain, a species of tree, or a sudden warmth after a cool period. Once you see them, they’re everywhere.
Similarly, plants and their myriad processes kind of jump out at you once you observe them closely. Before then they may seem relatively inert.