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Plants can sense the sound of rain, a new study finds
- namegulf 6mo agoPlants are living things
- soopypoos 6mo agofunding revoked
- therobots927 6mo agoDownvoted by incel doge bros
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pazimzadeh 6mo agoCool study. Not too surprising though given how much time plants have had to optimize growth. Kind of similarly, you don't need to swallow high energy drinks to get the performance benefits. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/15/high-energy-carbohydrate-drinks-performance-brain https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/15/high-energy-...
- unfitted2545 6mo agoCould this not be the sublingual absorbtion of sugar rather than seemingly random "brain signals" the article suggests?
- bandofthehawk 6mo agoI was thinking along similar lines. If this was purely due to brain signals, I would think the artificial sweetener would also work.
- istjohn 6mo agoThey did better drinking a placebo than swishing and spitting a beverage with real sugar, so no.
- giannicmptr1000 6mo agoA lot of people talk to their plants. I never judge them.
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoThe amount of things that plants can sense without a brain or nervous system is incredible.
- glenstein 6mo agoIt's awesome, but usual caveats apply that what sense means in the context of plants is something more like automatic biological reflexes, whereas the same language in the context of creatures with subjectivity has connotations that imply consciousness. We're learning everyday that the complexity of plants is spectacular and it only deepens our appreciation for them and rightly so. But it's easy to get lost in language and think appreciating plants necessitates attributing consciousness to them, or attributing an open-ended possibility, which even in it's more measured form still dramatically overshoots what can responsibly be said about their capabilities. Biomimicry is amazing, canopy patterns are amazing, optimizations to take advantage of water are amazing, signal exchanging in the face of disease or fire are amazing, and should be celebrated, and surely there is more we will yet learn. But nothing we have yet learned points to anything like consciousness, either in our form or in some possible alternative form.
- therobots927 6mo agoConsidering that we don’t even understand how consciousness works, I think it’s an open question. I’m also not sure why it’s so important for some to draw these distinctions.
- glenstein 6mo agoMaking claims that aren't supported by evidence is bad for all kinds of ordinary reasons I'm sure you know. And this topic in particular generates a lot of those kinds of claims. The same reason you might put a warning sign up in front of a big pot hole.
- nradov 6mo ago[flagged]
- OutOfHere 6mo agoThat's complete nonsense, considering plants sense damage, but do not feel pain the way humans do. Animals are in large part conscious as they have a brain capable of consciousness. You cannot excuse your way out of eating animals just because plants also sense things. As for fungi, they may have a memory, but they are closer to bacteria than to plants.
- nradov 6mo ago[flagged]
- glenstein 6mo agoWhy doesn't pain matter? It's almost the canonical example of a valenced state that practically any moral theory is tasked with making sense of on moral terms.
- nradov 6mo agoIt's just neural impulses. So what. Why should we care? Plants have different but equivalent mechanisms. Moral theory is bullshit. It's just made up.
- OutOfHere 6mo agoYou are not making any sense, and literally won't understand if you never got beat-up physically in life, perhaps as a kid, and preferably more than once. One has to experience pain first-hand to empathize with it. You must have lived an extremely sheltered life for this to not happen to you, and so you don't understand. Your nihilism doesn't relate with people. Yes, plants react functionally to damage, but in no way has any shred of consciousness been demonstrated in plants. You are just out to seek any excuse necessary to kill animals and perhaps humans too, with no difference.
- thebeardisred 6mo agoI would frame this completely differently: plants evolved around sensing the low level vibration created by rain as a signaling technique for the timing of sprouting. :shrug: Makes sense to me and doesn't try to turn this into some baffling mystery.
- sanjayjc 6mo ago"vibrations can be strong enough to dislodge a seed’s 'statoliths,' which are tiny gravity-sensing organelles within certain cells of a seed." "Statoliths are denser than a cell’s cytoplasm and can drift and sink through the cell, like a bit of sand in a jar of water. When a statolith finally settles to the bottom, its resting place on the cell’s membrane is a reflection of gravity’s direction and a signal for where a seed’s root or shoot should grow."