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Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
- kaapipo 4y agoSo I could make a plant watering reminder system by listening to the ultrasound in theory
- ecosystem 4y agoSounds tuned to human range: https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/979177 https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/979177
- tboerstad 4y agoThank you. I don’t know what I expected to hear, but it wasn’t that
- signa11 4y agoin this regard, i am always reminded of pioneering (in true sense of that word) work of jagdish-chandra-bose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose). it truly is fascinating !
- noisy_boy 4y agoHe was also one of the earliest Bengali science fiction writers[0] having published a story in 1896[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_science_fiction [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose#Science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose#Science_...
- leobg 4y agoSo where is the device that I can buy and put next to my house plants so I’ll hear when they are thirsty?
- yoavm 4y agoThey said you can use a simple $200 bat detector to record these sounds.
- moffkalast 4y agoHow about a $20 bat detector?
- kjkjadksj 4y agoJust probe for soil moisture if you are serious
- SteveDR 4y agoWay less fun
- willcipriano 4y agoWe know basically nothing about the world around us.
- camgunz 4y agoSo true, this has become one of my mantras.
- ungamedplayer 4y agoHow do you mentally frame it. Like "ignorance is acceptable" or "we are limited beings" I think as long as we are within the realm of reality, no single person or species can know everything so we need to accept contextual knowledge will be out limitation. I often wonder to what level will we need to know someone to be able to satisfy abstract statements.
- klyrs 4y agoyou'll never run out of amazing things to learn
- camgunz 4y agoMostly that life is wondrous and infinite, and if you're miserable or angry there's probably something you can learn to help with it, and this probably also works on a species level too. It can also give perspective. "Argh my coworker reformatted all my multiline list comprehensions" can become "what if reincarnation is real but it works in reverse with humanity somewhere near the bottom and bees somewhere near the top". Etc.
- pengaru 4y ago> And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil. > One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear. And terror possessed me then > And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" > And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! > You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."
- _Microft 4y agoGoogle says that this is part of the lyrics of "Disgustipated" by Tool.
- Pigalowda 4y agoIt'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.
- yieldcrv 4y agoA 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
- quonn 4y ago> Isn’t that enough? No, that is not enough.
- qbrass 4y agoWhile your body would also make noises if someone cut your head off, it's not a process your body evolved to signal everything around it to run.
- yieldcrv 4y agoIts what would happen anyway because its a precursor to more undermining of self-preservation
- schwartzworld 4y agoMaybe 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?
- yieldcrv 4y agoThat article didn’t, there are others that suggest there are signals to stressors that nearby plants react to. Even so, I can’t fly away from a tiger or bear. That analogy coupled with seeing that everything that can move, tries to move, makes me think plants would if they could. Sea anemones are very rudimentary and blind systems, and even they uproot themselves and “swim” away in the sloppiest way imaginable when a starfish is detected. Plenty of plants were able to select for defense mechanisms before reproduction. I think all would given the option.
- withinboredom 4y agoVegans aren't going to have anything to eat now... /s In all seriousness, this is wild.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- akomtu 4y agoWhat'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.
- Euphorbium 4y agoIf you camp in spring near fast growing grasses or bushes, you can clearly hear them grow.
- krisoft 4y agoHow do you know what you are hearing is them “growing” instead of wind rustling them or insects moving around?
- steve_adams_86 4y agoIn 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.
- AtomicOrbital 4y agoImplication is that they can also listen to such screaming
- DoreenMichele 4y agoI've been saying this for years. Should probably be merged with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35396901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35396901 Different links, but basically the same thing.
- afarviral 4y agoMy very unscientific take is the noises are the result of a mundane mechanical process that is a consequence of the plant not having enough water or loss of water due to cutting, which leads to some cavitation bubbles forming. So it may only be as interesting as saying that your water starts "screaming" when it is being boiled.
- hackerlight 4y agoMakes sense, it's hard to see see an evolutionary purpose to this.
- mdp2021 4y ago> This might be very helpful for agriculture. For instance, tomato plants emit sounds of stress before they started looking dehydrated We can now process it, so, as proactive evolution, it worked. Before that, > We know that certain animals are capable of hearing these sounds ... We still need to understand who is using this sound, what role does it play in the world, but it suggests many many possibilities // It's also possible plants themselves could react to these sounds, Hadany said. The same team found in a paper published in 2019 that plants can respond to the sounds of pollinators like bees. "They respond within three minutes by making sweeter nectar"
- stuaxo 4y agoWould love the new age types to get onto the idea that water screams.
- no_wizard 4y agoThere'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 was doing an investigative thing at the time, which is why I was there) So they already are!
- Ekaros 4y agoDoes 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?
- doubled112 4y agoNow we have to live like The Giving Tree was a documentary? Is this going to drive my food prices even higher?
- mdp2021 4y ago> panic None of those concerns are new. Jainism is at least three millennia old.
- pfannkuchen 4y agoIt is much newer in many parts of the world.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoMoral conclusions I don’t agree with are panics.
- DuckFeathers 4y agoAlso, strict Jains are only supposed to eat anything other than fruit that has fallen from the tree, taking into account the suffering of plants as living beings.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago> 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.
- scooperx 4y ago"Scream" is a sensationalist word, it anthromorphizes plants. You might as well say you can hear them sing Chop Suey's lyrics when they get cut down: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit Father, into your hands Why have you forsaken me? In your eyes forsaken me In your thoughts forsaken me In your heart forsaken me, oh
- aix1 4y agoThe story behind those lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P__qjVB9Tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P__qjVB9Tc
- crazygringo 4y agoThe start of the article is hilariously contradictory: > They may be filling your house with deafening clicks... > These noises are at about the volume of a normal human conversation...
- mdp2021 4y agoThe joke there is that for living entities as apparently quiet as plants human conversation level noise may seem a fracas. Rephrased: "for the standards of a plant as we may have imagined it, those noises may seem deafening".
- mejutoco 4y agoI recommend Overstory for a nice Pulitzer-winning books about how plants are similar to us but on a longer timeframe. It is full of beautiful stories too.
- svara 4y agoInformative 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 implications for plant monitoring in agriculture" To me even the "suggests..." part is wild overselling. IMO this should have been in such a high impact journal only if they had actually succeeded in demonstrating the ecological relevance, by showing that the sounds are detected and acted upon by other organisms.
- erie 4y ago[flagged]
- sarusso 4y agoBut you could use ultrasound sensors to monitor plants in agricolture... maybe this is why it got published in such a high impact factor journal.
- canadiantim 4y agoIf 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.
- 4y ago
- steponlego 4y agoVegans are going to have to re-evaluate their life choices. It might be much more cruel to harvest a field of soybeans than it is to kill a cow.
- debesyla 4y ago1) Veganism isn't solely about cruelty; 2) I find your debate that "structure/texture changing plant matter making sounds is the same as animal matter/brain feeling"... interesting.
- steponlego 4y agoIt's now well understood that plants communicate and can even have moods. Even algae. This wasn't even news decades ago.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoCavitation in a plant doesn’t mean it’s having a subjective experience much less one that I should care about more than, say, the experience of a dog being stepped on.
- timeon 4y ago> It might be much more cruel to harvest a field of soybeans than it is to kill a cow. How? Unlike cows, soybeans are harvested at the end or near to the end of it's lifecycle. Also huge amount of cows now require vast amounts of soybeans. So if you want to decrease harvesting of soybeans you need to first decrease farming of cows. So vegans are already in favor of decreasing soybean production.
- shlant 4y agothis comment says more about your confirmation bias and your ability to understand the information in the article than it does about the life choices of vegans
- petesergeant 4y agoInterestingly enough, The Economist’s April Fools joke is not dissimilar to this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gene-editing-created-generation-musical-230100300.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gene-editing-created-generati...
- maartn 4y agoThis must be april fools???
- moffkalast 4y agoIdk, does someone have a plant, some scissors, and a 60khz capable microphone on hand to confirm? This is a matter of utmost urgency!
- todd8 4y agoHow 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, stressing it even more. If you listen, you will hears a sound emitted by the stressed string that gradually dies off as the string recovers. Nearby strings will start vibrating in sympathy (if they are tuned properly). Could one string be communicating with the other strings? Common objects may be used to make the experiment easier to perform: banjos, guitars, violins, etc.
- JUNGLEISMASSIVE 4y agoDo strings grow on their own and sexually reproduce, though?
- TEP_KimIlSung 4y ago[dead]
- manmal 4y agoDo you mean resonance? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_resonance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_resonance
- Runeite51 4y agoWhen I used to live in a small room, one day I put my guitar kind of half-way into my closet by the corner of the room. A few mins later I yelled something (I forget what) and it was as though my guitar strummed the A string on its own. It freaked me out for a sec but then I started belting different notes, and as soon as I got back to a certain note the guitar would strum itself again!
- jschveibinz 4y agoYour comment rings true.
- costco 4y agoInterestingly L. Ron Hubbard was laughed at for saying tomatoes scream when [sliced](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...). I don't know enough about this to know how important it is or whether it's actually some kind of signalling.
- dang 4y agoThere's also https://www.businessinsider.com/plants-shriek-with-high-pitched-ultrasonic-clicks-when-stressed-study-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/plants-shriek-with-high-pitc... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35396901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35396901, but we merged that thread hither)
- _8j50 4y agoDidn't the founder of scientology claim plants scream when they are in pain and even "invented" a machine to measure their pain? I wonder how they interpret this finding.
- DuckFeathers 4y agoThe Lex Fridman podcast[1] with Aaron Smith-Levin, a former scientology insider (who grew out of it), made me believe that Scientology has been overly vilified, most likely because it threatens power of specific people, just what the scientologists claim. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1lN9zkK_k0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1lN9zkK_k0
- kilianinbox 4y agoThe intriguing sound produced by my guitar can be quite revealing, particularly when it’s out of tune. All physical objects have a resonant characteristic that conveys information. When an object, such as a sphere, undergoes a transformation, its resonance changes as well. Additionally, in systems with flowing components, specific flow rates can yield a wide range of patterns. Some might be chaotic, while others, like those arising from DNA replication, result in recognizable and recurring patterns. To delve deeper into this idea, ponder the question, “Can AI bridge the gap between human consciousness and that of other animals, like whales?” Investigating the inherent intelligence within these patterns can provide us with valuable insights. As we embark on an era where humanity sets an example for our behavior towards less powerful beings, it’s crucial to acknowledge that artificial general intelligence (AGI) might replicate our actions. The time has come for us to establish a benchmark and pave the way for a more ethical and harmonious world. Additionally, many have heard of animals that feast on fallen fruit. Embracing a similar approach could prove beneficial for humans before we contemplate altering our DNA to incorporate photosynthesis in the quest for ideal ethics. So, let’s keep an open mind and explore the possibilities! ;)
- mcswell 4y agoI am astounded that no one has mentioned "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl (1949), in which a scientist invents a machine that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to humans. He discovers that plants scream when cut. You can read it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-machine https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
- papandada 4y agoI wonder if this is the source of a Jack Handey joke: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
- aarondia 4y agoThis reminds me of an Upton Sinclair quote: “was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whine this hog personality was precious. To whome these hog squeals and agonies had meaning?”
- Runeite51 4y agoThat was a cool read. It took me on a long journey to find references to it... seems like there's actually some truth to it.
- mathstuf 4y agoI think the BFG could also hear the screams of trees as they were being chopped down.
- codetrotter 4y agoSources online agree with you. > The BFG could hear the tread of a ladybird's footsteps as she walks across a leaf, the whispering of ants as they carry around in the soil talking to one another, and the sudden shrill cry of pain a tree gives out when a woodman cuts into it with an axe. https://www.icsestudyguide.com/2020/10/class-5-english-literature-big-friendly.html?m=1 https://www.icsestudyguide.com/2020/10/class-5-english-liter...
- TEP_KimIlSung 4y ago[dead]
- fionic2 4y agowhen a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it... does it make a sound?
- henearkr 4y agoWait before your hear the harrowing laments of the rocks cracking in the cold. /s No, more seriously, stop giving an emotional meaning to a sound.
- eternalban 4y agoThat's nothing. Dutch plants tweet: https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/dutch-tree-sends-tweets-about-climate-change.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/dutch-tree-sends-tweets-ab...
- uuuguaii 4y ago[flagged]
- rukuu001 4y agoI’m curious that this is surprising? Tree pheromone communication is well know. Plant -> fungus communication as well. Here’s a writeup that covers both: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering... Is sound too shocking a step?
- genr8 4y agoI 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/researchers_have_found_that_plants_know_they_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/641t0b/researcher...
- mobb_solo 4y ago"The Secret Life of Plants" -Tompkins & Bird (1973)
- stametseater 4y agoThe metal tin screams in pain when you bend it. Surely it is conscious..
- Izkata 4y agoThere was an article I read like a decade ago about some research that when bugs eat a particular tree, the tree would react in two ways: Emit some sort of chemical that hurt or resisted the bug, and emit something (can't remember if it was sound or something pheremone-like) that caused nearby trees of the same species to emit the same chemical, allowing them to proactively protect themselves.
- pvaldes 4y ago>"sounds are airborne" ehhmm... yep? Do we know of any special type of sound unable to travel by the air that could be recorded by a microphone separated by several cm of air? >"this sound is informative" Not different than saying "Plants had evolved a plant telephone to be informed from other plants or inform animals that they need a pee, right now" Why a plant in a humid spot at the valley should suffer and react as its neighbors in a dry spot on the top of the hill? That would be inefficient and negative for their survival. Does not add much to the info that they have yet (collected with their own roots) and can be deceptive. I noticed that forks emit a sound when they are drop and hit the soil. So this means that is a mechanism to alert other forks of the danger. So forks must have ears. Pure logic. "We assume a link between many things that could be unrelated in order to sell animism 2.0 and grab eyeballs" would be a better title
- leovander 4y agoI don't think even hard science can save the masterpiece of a movie, The Happening[0]. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0949731/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0949731/
- trickjarrett 4y agoI remember hearing this back in the late 90s and I came into my high school biology class and mentioned it. The teacher was kind enough not to call me a moron but he made clear he didn't believe it, and I didn't (and don't) remember where I had heard it back then. Glad to know I wasn't completely wrong for regurgitating that factoid then.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoIf I had to hear my salad scream it would make being a vegetarian much more difficult.