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Plants can detect sound

economist.com

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Re: Plants can detect sound

#91

Post by dncornholio »

LoveMortuus wrote: post #72
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

Paper on the experiment, where they test if the plant will mimic the leaves of an artificial plastic plant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/ Quite a read, I hope others replicate the study, because this is fascinating. If we're able to really point in the direction that the plant uses vision to mimic other plants leaves (even artificial plant), I wonder how that vision works!

There should have been multiple types mimic-leaves because we cannot rule out this is the plants normal growth.

Also should have let the plant grow without any mimic leaves and with an actually growing plant.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#92

Post by 0daystock »

yieldcrv wrote: post #86

next up: plants suffer and try to avoid suffering, vegans die out due to inability to reduce suffering or move the goal post to something selfishly convenient just like everyone else. just a matter of time.

Flawed argument because animals still eat 10x the amount of plants vegans do. So if plant suffering was a legitimate concern, one would still be vegan, which is a lifestyle to reduce harm to animals.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#93

Post by pvaldes »

yojo wrote: post #70
pvaldes wrote: post #62

pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action. [1] Stop reading at "Plants living near a busy road have their grow stunt because noise", that is just the dumbest explanation available in the bag. Do they noticed that those areas are typically contaminated with heavy metals?

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 frogs sing all night long at 90 Db, 20,000 frogs in each hectare. The place is filled with cicadas, Howling Monkeys, and Wild Red fowl roosters competing to be the most annoying thing. Cotinga birds and friends sing at 110-125 Db!. non stop, by day... Do we think that plants care about that? They couldn't grow faster.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#95

Post by xkcd-sucks »

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).

> but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch

s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \

The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses)

also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others

Some intro material below

    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system
    - https://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechanoreceptors-draft/
    - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mechanoreceptor                    
    - chapters are on scihub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1

Re: Plants can detect sound

#96

Post by yieldcrv »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #89
yieldcrv wrote: post #86

next up: plants suffer and try to avoid suffering, vegans die out due to inability to reduce suffering or move the goal post to something selfishly convenient just like everyone else. just a matter of time.

It should be a red flag when you're hoping for huge shake-up discoveries in the future to justify your behavior today.

I believe plants are valid organisms that avoid negative stimuli and that this undermines 'suffer' based consumption arguments

There are other plant consumption / meat avoidance preferences I am completely fine with

Re: Plants can detect sound

#97

Post by yieldcrv »

0daystock wrote: post #92
yieldcrv wrote: post #86

next up: plants suffer and try to avoid suffering, vegans die out due to inability to reduce suffering or move the goal post to something selfishly convenient just like everyone else. just a matter of time.

Flawed argument because animals still eat 10x the amount of plants vegans do. So if plant suffering was a legitimate concern, one would still be vegan, which is a lifestyle to reduce harm to animals.

there are plenty of reasons to be avoid eating meat that have nothing to do with reducing harm to animals.

and animals consuming plants has nothing to do with any of your observations. If this was a standardized test prompt, your first sentence would be erroneous information.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#98

Post by david-gpu »

dncornholio wrote: post #91
LoveMortuus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper on the experiment, where they test if the plant will mimic the leaves of an artificial plastic plant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/ Quite a read, I hope others replicate the study, because this is fascinating. If we're able to really point in the direction that the plant uses vision to mimic other plants leaves (even artificial plant), I wonder how that vision works!

There should have been multiple types mimic-leaves because we cannot rule out this is the plants normal growth. Also should have let the plant grow without any mimic leaves and with an actually growing plant.

> There should have been multiple types mimic-leaves because we cannot rule out this is the plants normal growth.

From the Wikipedia article [0] linked by the GP:

> Ernesto Gianoli said "Boquila's leaves are extraordinarily diverse. The biggest ones can be 10 times bigger than the smallest, and they can vary from very light to very dark. In around three-quarters of cases, they are similar to the closest leaf from another tree, matching it in size, area, length of stalk, angle, and color. Boquila's leaves can even grow a spiny tip when, and only when, it climbs onto a shrub with spine-tipped leaves."[5]

> When there are no nearby host leaves to influence them, the normal leaves of B. trifoliolata are relatively short and light green with rounded edges.[6]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila

Re: Plants can detect sound

#99

Post by Modified3019 »

As an aside, insects often use their feet to “hear” vibrations from the plant they are standing on, allowing them to seemingly “silently” communicate with others on that plant by transmitting vibrations through it, or detect when an animal is coming along.

Notably in my experience, corn rootworm beetle were especially adept at hearing me walking along through corn and hiding before there was any possibility of seeing me. I’d have to stop and be still for a minute for them to start crawling about again.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#100

Post by mecsred »

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.
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