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Plants can detect sound
- borissk 3y agoUnpaywalled: https://archive.ph/SVoRk https://archive.ph/SVoRk
- jimmaswell 3y agoI ththought of this: https://youtu.be/b9UO9tn4MpI?si=JhvoaRUdBLed-LBR https://youtu.be/b9UO9tn4MpI?si=JhvoaRUdBLed-LBR
- borissk 3y agoCrazy russians :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Fnoord 3y agoI thought of this [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants
- Fnoord 3y agoThis one of the same author is equally interesting [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGmlDY2sDg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGmlDY2sDg8
- fortran77 3y agoCorn has ears.
- borissk 3y agoAnd a strong political lobby in US :)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoCorn are Legal People?
- DangitBobby 3y agoFortran77: 1 The Economist: 0
- bpanon 3y ago"The Secret Life of Plants" is a great book on this subject.
- aschearer 3y agoThey don't have eyes but can detect light, too...
- 11235813213455 3y agothey don't have feet but they can detect gravity too and grow vertically when they can
- borissk 3y agoI won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes can detect and react to sound - just a matter of more research to find out how.
- addaon 3y ago> I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes can detect and react to sound It would have to be pretty insanely high in the ultrasound. A 30 kHz (above the top of usual audible sound range) wave is around 10 mm (10000 µm) in wavelength; a typical prokaryote is of order 1 µm. While there are some uses for MHz-scale ultrasound, the attenuation starts getting pretty insane -- there's just not much energy at the scale of gigahertz sound to detect.
- borissk 3y agoInteresting, but a longer wave will still have some impact, that can be detected by a smaller organism - or not?
- bacon_waffle 3y agoImagine an elevator that moves up and down its shaft with a sinusoidal elevation over time. Riding in that elevator, one could detect frequencies with quite long wavelengths compared to the size of a person. A less abstract example is a boat at sea.
- user_7832 3y agoWhy would you assume that the order of magnitude of the animal is similar to the wavelength? Elephants can communicate with as low as 1hz. The wavelength of that is over 300m. If the amplitude is high enough, human too can comfortably “feel” infrasonic.
- archsurface 3y ago"Plants don't have ears." - Learn something new every day.
- slimsag 3y agoThis seems verifiably false, too. Why else would it be called an 'ear' of corn?
- archsurface 3y ago[flagged]
- eclecticfrank 3y agoDon't trust everything on the internet. At least some plants have ears. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_(botany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_(botany)
- archsurface 3y agoEquivocation fallacy.
- noman-land 3y agoThis 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).
- rafale 3y agoI think collision or interaction are better words. The word touch is meant for bigger objects, like hands, animals, furniture, fabrics, not molecules and electromagnetic radiation.
- camillomiller 3y agoIsn’t touch a biological pressure sensor though? Could be similar to hearing, sure, but taste, smell and sight are definitely more like chemical and electromagnetic sensors.
- Calavar 3y agoIf you want to get that reductive, ultimately everything in the universe is just particles and forces and interactions between them, and any concepts beyond that are arbitrary lines drawn by us humans in an attempt to organize the chaos. In the case of senses, it's about perception. We perceive the signals from our retinas differently than the ones from our fingertips, so we give them different names (sight vs. touch). There are also differences in the "hardware" -- sight and touch signals start with different kinds of receptors, travel down different nerves, and are processed in different parts of the brain -- but the hardware differences don't map 1:1 to the way that we categorize senses. For example, pain and pressure are processed by entirely different types of receptors, but we still call them both touch. On the flip side, balance and hearing share a lot of the same hardware, but we consider them to be different senses.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoSimilar to a question I had in physics class at school, which was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.
- darkflame91 3y agoRoald Dahl wrote a short story, 'The Sound Machine' that's on very similar lines. Looks like it can be found in its entirety here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-machine https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
- euroderf 3y agoOh wow. I've been trying to find that story for decades but couldn't remember title or author. I read it as a teenager and it left an impression. Thank you for posting!
- endorphine 3y agoPerhaps a better title would be: "Plants can detect sound".
- bigbacaloa 3y ago[dead]
- jingles_dev 3y agoIn my studies, we place EEG electrode on them, they produce different amount of electrical signals in different conditions too.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoPiezoelectric sensors can hear! /s
- signa11 3y 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 !
- patrickscoleman 3y agoJust read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids
- kilolima 3y agoI think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI wouldn't say Annihilation is in any way a remake of Stalker, shameless or not. It is clearly inspired by it a bit in terms of setting, but it has a very different message to say. Stalker was essentially a movie about faith. Annihilation is a movie about self-destruction, both in the destructive sense, but also as a necessary step to building a new self. The concept of a special zone where things are not the same as in normal reality is merely a shared motif.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI think the setting is a pretty big part of Annihilation. The "about" is something that's shared by many different works, but the setting is a bit more unusual. So while I don't agree that it's a shameless remake, I would say the most distinctive thing about it is the setting, and so to some extent it's a fair cop.
- tsimionescu 3y agoIf we go into details about the setting, it is still vastly different from Stalker. The Zone in Stalker is only vaguely and mysteriously abnormal, in a subtle, mostly faith-based kind of way. By contrast, the Zone in Annihilation is very overtly supernatural, and in very specific ways that are important to the point it's trying to make - merging and recombining humans and the problems that face them, and manifesting internal struggles externally. To be fair, the Zone in Roadside Picnic, the novel Stalker adapts, is also more overtly supernatural, but still in a very different way. I really don't think it's fair to consider Stalker or Roadside Picnic anything more than inspiration for Annihilation.
- IshKebab 3y agoI was reading about this last week and the thing that struck me is that every experiment was "plants respond more to <musical genre> than <other musical genre>", or male voices vs female voices or swearing vs compliments. It's total pseudoscience designed to generate comedy science articles and press releases. If anyone actually cared about this they'd be playing sine waves and white noise at various frequencies and amplitudes. You'd see a graph of growth vs frequency or whatever. I couldn't find anything like that though. Does this article have it (can't read due to paywall).
- lacrimacida 3y agoScience for clicks
- xbmcuser 3y agoI guess this answers the question If a Tree Falls in the Forest and There's No One Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound? yes the trees do hear it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sebmellen 3y agoMother Earth's Plantasia — warm earth music for plants and the people who love them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZkR3PyHTs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZkR3PyHTs0
- belter 3y agoWhy the change in the title? It is not the original and there is nothing clikbaity about it. Is HN now editorializing the Economist?
- lmpdev 3y agoConcision?
- Ensorceled 3y agoThe "plants don't have ears" part of the original title was, at best, unnecessarily folksy.
- belter 3y agoGuidelines say: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
- Ensorceled 3y agoI'm saying is probably click bait.
- qlm 3y agoBoquila 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> One hypothesis is that volatile organic compounds emitted from host plant leaves induce a phenotypic change in nearby B. trifoliolata leaves. By receiving different host signals into its system, it is able to create specific signals and hormones in its tissues to regulate gene transcription of leaf morphology and developmental pathways for leaf differentiation.[12] The other hypothesis is that there could be horizontal gene transfer between the host and B. trifoliolata. A separate study also conducted by Gianoli et al. suggests that bacterial agents, which could mediate a horizontal gene transfer, may play a role in leaf mimicry by B. trifoliolata. See, here are two perfectly reasonable explanations for the mimicry that don't involve "seeing" anything. > A 2021 paper suggested that the plant has some sort of vision using ocelli. This hypothesis was presented on the basis of experiments in which the vine appeared to mimic plastic vines and artificial plants. Plastic vines and artificial plants too!? There go those two theories.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoshadow patterns and reflected light from nearby leaves or leaf- like bits of plastic as signals perhaps?
- LoveMortuus 3y agoPaper 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/ 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!
- 3y ago
- pvaldes 3y agopseudoscience, 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?
- Ensorceled 3y ago> pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action. This eloquently and entirely refutes all the claims, excellent work.
- yojo 3y agoThat’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 traffic noise recorded from a busy motorway in Tehran for 16 hours a day. The other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days had passed, samples were taken from the youngest fully expanded leaves on every plant in the experiment and studied.” The plants were exposed to sound in a lab, with a control group. They were not actually next to a motorway.
- pvaldes 3y agoEvolving 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.
- amelius 3y agoOk, so I wonder if my plants would do better if I recorded jungle sounds and played them back when I'm not at home.
- hutzlibu 3y agoThere were quite some experiments in that direction, but using music. I don't recall the name or have a link to such a study at hand (and I do question and never researched how scientific it was done) but the plants seemed to prefer Ravi Shankar instead of Heavy Metal.
- adyashakti 3y agothis is old news. we were doing experiments with plants and music back in the 1960s. but nobody liked our results because we found that modern styles are toxic, and ancient vedic sacred chants are the most nourishing sound vibrations.
- yieldcrv 3y agonext 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.
- petemir 3y agoSurely this study has been funded by the meat industry.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoIt should be a red flag when you're hoping for huge shake-up discoveries in the future to justify your behavior today.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI 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
- 0daystock 3y agoFlawed 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.
- yieldcrv 3y agothere 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.
- adolph 3y agoThis post definitely needs a link to the wonderful book by Ed Yong, An Immense World. Given all that even simple animals can sense and affect, it is not surprising that plants will hold further sensory surprises. https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp/0593133234 https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...
- Modified3019 3y agoAs 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.
- mecsred 3y agoI 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.
- bobbiechen 3y agoI think it's interesting to contrast to vision/light: similarly, there is a physical effect which we can perceive "from a distance". But vision varies wildly even among animals, and there are plenty of wavelengths of light that we can't perceive. I enjoyed a brief discussion of this in Andy Weir's The Martian (no spoilers here).
- carapace 3y agoThere was an experiment where a scientist (I think it was Pask) built a cybernetic chemical machine in a petri dish. When the requirement to respond to sound was introduced, the machine grew "ears": spines of different lengths (that therefore vibrated at different resonant frequencies like the hairs in the inner ear.) (One of the most fascinating and terrifying experiments ever conducted IMO.) Then there was the famous case of the program optimized by genetic programming that wouldn't function correctly on any but the FPGA it was evolved on; the program had adapted itself to idiosyncrasies of the hardware that were invisible on the level of the specification. Just as Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm evolves an electric charge so evolution, uh, evolves whatever potentialities are there and adaptive. In sum, duh. Of course plants are sensitive to sound. The contradictory hypothesis would be that there's nothing useful to plants in their soundscape. And doesn't that sound obviously silly?
- kderbyma 3y agoAnother obvious article....they make it too which was a lot more of an announcement. this is assumed by many people....notice how loud traffic affects Plants