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Tomato fruits send electrical warnings to the rest of the plant when attacked
- database_lost 5y agoHmm, interesting, this reminds me of recent research where they used electrical currents and magnetic fields to enhance tomato plants, I wonder how the two findings are linked. (here's the article I saw: http://horticulturejournal.usamv.ro/index.php/scientific-papers/issues?id=819 http://horticulturejournal.usamv.ro/index.php/scientific-pap... )
- lpasselin 5y agoDoes anyone have papers like this to recommend? I am really interested in building custom systems to experiment with plants. My problem is that I don't know what to test.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago“The Secret Life of Trees” was a seminal book in this field, but not a research paper
- belter 5y agoThat is why they call it a Power 'Plant' ...sorry for the pun ..could not resist. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Power_plant https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Power_plant
- belter 5y agoNot a paper...TED presentation "Electrical Battery Using Defective Tomatoes" https://youtu.be/18sOzfxcrHE https://youtu.be/18sOzfxcrHE
- mc32 5y agoDoes this mean the tomato plant doesn’t want its seeds carried away and would prefer to have the ripe tomatoes to fall to the ground?
- ianlevesque 5y agoCaterpillars don't move the seeds around in a beneficial way. Maybe it can tell the difference? I'm kind of curious what a tomato plant does with the information that it's being munched on though.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago> the authors measured the biochemical responses, such as defensive chemicals like hydrogen peroxide, across other parts of the plant. This showed that these defenses were triggered even in parts of the plant that were far away from the damage caused by the caterpillars. Presumably hydrogen peroxide does not taste good to caterpillars.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoThere is more to this. Mostly in (Swiss)German though, from 1988. Tags would be "Der Urzeit Code" Some do experiment with that today, like this [1] https://alainsprojects.com/the-primeval-code-der-urzeit-code/ https://alainsprojects.com/the-primeval-code-der-urzeit-code... I also remember news about chinese greenhouses experimenting with similar stuff, reporting good growth and much reduced need for pesti-/fungi-/whatever -zides, or none at all in the timeframe of the last 2 to 3 years. It all resulted from research at Ciba-Geigy AG, Basel, Swiss now Novartis by Guido Ebner, thus also called "Ebner Effect". Classic conspiracy material, because not usable for a company like that, so they stopped the research, and locked it away. (allegedly) The researcher died meanwhile, but his sons have some patents, also selling this [2] https://fios-greenbox.net/ https://fios-greenbox.net/ Some more lazy links... [3] https://www.elstel.org/primeval-times-code.html https://www.elstel.org/primeval-times-code.html [4] https://vimeo.com/14844889 https://vimeo.com/14844889 [5] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2164365/electric-plants-powering-chinas-new-agricultural-revolution https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2164365/elec...
- __s 5y agoScientologists already figured this out over half a century ago with their E-meters
- treeman79 5y agoGood old e-meters and all the hippies that gave speeches at school about how plants have feelings and it was scientifically proven
- f6v 5y agoWhat are we supposed to eat?
- dennis_jeeves 5y agoValid question only for a person who is vegan for 'ethical' reasons, who believes that some how plants are exempt from pain and suffering.
- pell 5y agoPlants don't have a central nervous system or a brain. What science generally understands under pain and suffering plants simply don't have.
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago>Plants don't have a central nervous system or a brain. So? does that automatically imply that it does not feel pain? >What science generally understands under pain and suffering plants simply don't have. Listen, I don't buy the science say this and science say that kind of arguments. ANY living being ( assuming we can settle for what can be called 'alive') will have a mechanism for self preservation, pain is one of them. The onus is on 'science' or people to prove otherwise.
- OlleTO 5y ago
- jbverschoor 5y agoAvatar
- ourmandave 5y agoI'm wondering what the rest of the plant supposed to do with that warning? Remain perfectly still like Drax so it doesn't see us? Try to taste bad?
- 988747 5y agoProbably the latter: Taste bad, and possibly become more poisonous for catepilars. It is quite possible to use that electric signal to trigger some chemical reaction that would accomplish this.
- vages 5y agoPerhaps it’s just a side effect of some other system in the plant, like an electrical pulse to communicate “the way this branch is growing has little/much sunlight”.
- wyldfire 5y agoThat's a 'phototropism' IIRC and it's not caused by electrical signals but instead by growth hormones called auxins. This is what little I recall from high school biology, anyways. IIRC the auxins inhibit cell division and different ones cause different tropism phenomena.
- vikramkr 5y agoPlants have all sorts of defense mechanisms, toxins etc, that they've evolved (since they're sitting ducks). Its a reasonable hypothesis that some energetically intensive to produce toxin could have its production induced, for example (the plant wouldn't want to waste energy on producing the toxins when not needed). I believe there are also plants that have been shown to release compounds that attract parasitic wasps to kill the pest. That could also be triggered here, another reasonable hypothesis.
- sundvor 5y agoI wanted to share the Hidden life Of Trees book, for anyone finding the above fascinating. The author explores the idea that trees use fungal networks to communicate, which is further to what we see about the plants here. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life-of-trees https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life... (I can recommend the Audible version.)
- ruffrey 5y agoMy father grew up on a farm that was mostly for subsistence. He said to pinch off the first few green tomatoes to improve yields. I occasionally do this but have not tried to measure any yield differences.
- h2odragon 5y agoThat's simple pruning; the plant can be encouraged to grow more foliage before it turns its attention to making fruits; thus making more plant mass available to do the fruit growing. In my experience that tends to encourage more, smaller fruit; which is good cuz it reduces loss to insects etc (they ruin a whole fruit at a time). If you want a single tomato the size of a child's head, tho; let it keep the first few it sets and then pinch flowers before they open after that.
- ineedasername 5y agoIt feels kind of wrong to use "child's head" as the unit of size for a tomato. Maybe because of all the slicing and chopping we often do to tomatoes before we eat them.
- h2odragon 5y agoSalesman said "it's a family size freezer!" ... I says, "not unless you chop them up first."
- shakna 5y agoThis process is called "thinning" [0] (as distinct from pruning), and is employed by farmers the world over. And has been done for several hundred years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinning#In_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinning#In_agriculture
- hirundo 5y agoImagine rigging your plants with sensors and gardening by sentiment analysis. "The zucchini are worried today, give them some extra TLC."
- codetrotter 5y agoCreate a global network of Tomato sensors. Correlate Tomato sentiment with Bitcoin price. Buy and sell Bitcoin based on the feelings of the Tomatoes.
- ftio 5y agoAnd perhaps a fellow Italian will invent the first non-fungible, blockchain-powered pasta sauce, Moneronara, or even its Roman cousin, Carbitnara.
- armenarmen 5y agoI’m working on getting my mining rig to run off of clean renewable tortured tomato power already
- ezekg 5y agoLol this made me chuckle
- techbio 5y agoProfit by selling shovels.
- lsh123 5y agoYou forgot to insert AI somewhere
- cutemonster 5y agoI think the tomatoes is the AI, or FI to be exact (fruitful intelligence)
- stoat_meniscus 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pjdkoch 5y agoSo, pain.
- GuB-42 5y agoDoes it mean that tomatoes feel pain? Electrical signals in response to an attack that trigger a defensive response look a lot like pain.
- staticman2 5y agoThey don't have brains or central nervous systems so it seems unlikely they feel pain.
- Glavnokoman 5y agoI guess "feel" might not be the exactly right word here but the "pain" is.
- ineedasername 5y agoI don't think you can separate "feel" from the concept of pain. That's pretty much baked in. Maybe there just needs to be another word to encompass plant signalling of this sort.
- jfoster 5y agoNot sure whether it's centralised, but the finding of the study in the article sounds like it's essentially that plants (or at least this type of tomato plant) do have some form of nervous system or equivalent, isn't it?
- prvnsmpth 5y agoIf you assume the human-centric definition of the word "pain", perhaps. But I don't think that paints a complete picture - organisms experience and react to negative stimuli in so many different ways. IMO, what we're seeing here could absolutely be considered "pain" in the plant kingdom, without altering or stretching the definition of the word even in the slightest.
- staticman2 5y agoWhy would you use a human term like pain for the plant? Here's a biologist saying not all humans experience pain, if it's not even a universal human experience I don't know why you'd apply it to plants instead of a more technical term: "Interviewer: Right, and isn't sensing damage, even without a neural system, essentially pain? Daniel Chamovitz: The idea that damage has to be pain is mistaken. We feel pain because we have specific types of receptors called nociceptors which are programmed to respond to pain, not to touch. People can have genetic malfunctions where they feel pressure but never feel pain because they don't have pain receptors." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/xd74nd/we-asked-a-botanist-how-sure-science-is-that-plants-cant-feel-pain-302 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/xd7..." A different article on the subject on plant pain has a biologist suggesting not to use human terms or animal terms: ""Plants can detect light, but I don’t think you can say plants can ‘see.’” The same goes for hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling. The terms we use to describe our own interface with the world don’t seem transferable to plants. They describe the contours of a human-centric reality, made possible by our animal anatomy."" https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/can-plants-feel-pain https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/can-plants-fee...
- ineedasername 5y agoThere was a series of documentaries made about a tomato strain that developed more active measures against attacks [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Killer_Tomatoes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Killer_Tomatoe...
- chiefalchemist 5y agoThis is interesting. I do a veg garden, with tomatoes of course. When I water them at the end of the day I also spray the tops because I want the leaves to tell the roots...get ready, rain is coming. I have no idea if this happens or not. But from a survival perspective it makes sense that it would.
- xor99 5y agoCellulose has a small piezoelectric effect so I wonder if that has something to do with it. Same with bone.
- giardini 5y agoThere were 4 tomato plants in the experimental group and 1 in the control group (so 5 in all). I don't think we can declare that plants think or even have communication among their parts based on this small amount of data. Too many other possibilities.
- tastyfreeze 5y agoThe plant world is "smarter" than we give it credit. Some plants count, keep time, and communicate with their environment. This research is in a similar vein to this TED talk showing some of the neat things plant do that we would attribute as features of the animal kingdom. https://youtu.be/pvBlSFVmoaw https://youtu.be/pvBlSFVmoaw
- pvelagal 5y agoI am not sure how this is perceived as attack ? Sending electrical signals doesn't have to mean attack by default. Pollination happens via bees.. then the fruit grows to attract birds or animals who eat them and spread the seeds through excretions or else the fruit will fall off and rot...
- SMAAART 5y agoSentient tomatoes? PeTA, where are you?
- PretzelPirate 5y agoThere hasn’t been any evidence of sentience presented.
- gillytech 5y agoThis isn't entirely new. L. Ron Hubbard ran experiments like this in the 60's and came to similar conclusions. He found that “tomatoes scream when sliced.” Check this article a bit over halfway down the piece: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/06/16/meet-your-vegetables/K9Q57mh3vuj5P2RvV6rUuK/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/06/16/meet-your-veget...
- ineedasername 5y agoI wouldn't regard anything that Hubbard said or did as a proper scientific enquiry or trust his word on the results.
- korse 5y agoNo, but it is certainly funny seeing this on the front page of HN after laughing on and off over a period of literal years about the L. Ron 'Tomatometer'...
- Aperocky 5y ago> The team also used machine learning to identify patterns in the signals. > he results showed a clear difference between the signals before and after attack. If they didn't use a rigorous separation of train, test and validation sets, I'm skeptical that this might have been overtraining.
- anthk 5y agoOne day some guy will build a potato powered Rasberry Pi.
- a11r 5y agoElectrical activity in plants has been known to science for a long time: https://www.thebetterindia.com/76587/jagdish-chandra-bose-indian-biophysicist-radio-plant-physiology/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/76587/jagdish-chandra-bose-in...
- gnubet 5y agowho would attack a tomato
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoThis seems contradictory: "Tomato fruits inform the mother plant when they are being eaten by caterpillars, shows a new study. Little is known about whether a fruit can communicate with the plant to which it’s attached" Didn't the first sentence indicate that YES, it can?
- xg15 5y ago> Plants have a multitude of chemical and hormonal signaling pathways, which are generally transmitted through the sap That's why I find popular claims of the form "plants can't do X because they have no nervous system" somewhat misleading. Plant cells still have all the other means of inter-cell signalling available - so communication and information processing is happening a lot slower in plants than in animals, but it absolutely does take place.
- Pe1er 5y agoSo maybe it makes sense to speak with your plants ; ) Anyway don't find it that surprising. Basically it seems a natural advantage to have such warning mechanism.