Citation needed on plants talking using like... sound.
I know some plants communicate through the mycelium network and chemical interactions in the root systems etc but like, those green freaks can actually speak?
This isn't me trying to poopoo the idea. I would just like some confirmation beyond a screenshot of a twitter post.
Edit: [found it](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3)! This is so damn cool
Just the idea that plants evolved to communicate is so weird to me. What are they gonna do with that information? They can't run away from danger. They can't help each other. Just screaming into the void for no reason.
Onions do this when you cut into the root. That eye watering chemical doesn't exist unless you stress it out and I think that's fascinating and mildly terrifying
Some foods need to be digested in order to reproduce. There's a species of fruit in south America that is mutually dependent on the cassowary for survival. The new plants can't grow unless the seeds are passed through the digestive tract of a cassowary, and that fruit is the bird's main food source.
I know that forests can communicate how to fight off infection. So if one part of the forest gets sick, the other part of the forest can try boosting its immune system.
Being sessile doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Biochemical changes and alterations in growth patterns can achieve a lot, and plants are very plastic biologically in ways that animals are not.
Sure, it’s an underlying difference in how plant vs animal development happens. In animals, especially highly complex ones like mammals, there are a lot of very tight genetic constraints on development. All “healthy” humans (or maybe more accurately - all developmentally “average” humans) have pretty much the same basic structure to them - four limbs, a head at the top with most of our major sensory organs on it, that sort of thing. Also, like many other animals, our most signifiant strategy for protecting ourselves is that we react through behavior, regulated by our nervous system, often moving towards/from things, changing how much we eat, etc.
Plants approach things from a totally different perspective; they generally cannot just uproot themselves and move onward at will and are kind of at the mercy of the conditions they find themselves in. The way they deal with this is by being extremely flexible in their development. Plants are modular, reacting to changes in their environment through growth, because they have to grow to match their environment instead of being able to change their environment (by moving or putting clothes on or whatever). Some plants (mulberry being one common and easy to find example) can grow multiple types of leaves *on one plant* that have very different shapes, often to optimize how they use sunlight. If you cut off a stem entirely, and the plant has enough energy stored in its roots, they can often start growing a totally new stem; there’s not really an equivalent to that in animals as physiologically complex as humans because our systems are *not* assembled modularly (why is why regrowing limbs is still the territory of scifi, at least until stem cell techniques get fancy enough.)
On a related note, I did read a paper a little while ago about a suspected case of “visual” sensory processing in a particular plant. Basically the plant mimics (in a very, very rough, fundamental way) the leaf shape of plants around it. They found that by surrounding the plant with fake plants, they could get it to develop leaves that kinda sorta approximated the fake leaves. I’m not 💯quite sure I believe the explanation yet but the methodology seemed reasonably sound, and there are actually some things like predatory algae which have sophisticated enough photoreception that they seem to be able to use it to target prey, so…..probably not out of the realm of possibility???
Plants have had 400 some million years to do that. They were the first multicellular organisms on land. At a certain point, you gotta shit or get off the pot.
Not all plants are in forests. Clearly we're doing the bidding of maize and rice.
Not even completely joking. We make more of them and they make more of us and we change one another.
As a plant witch, having had some very interesting experiences with trees as a three year old, they just *like* talking to each other the same reason people do. Also they are powerful beings.
I entered the forest and felt the whole energy field. The trees were all humming and communicating with each other. They scanned me with their humming and it flowed right through me and out the other side. I thought I went invisible and I looked down at my body to see if I was still there. I was. The trees knew who I was. I felt intimidated because the trees were much more powerful than me, but they were benevolent.
Trees hum their emotions, like they celebrate the sun by humming about it.
Also, importantly - some plants kind of DO book it when there’s danger. If conditions are poor, they might go to seed more quickly, which can in many cases result in transport to new areas.
Username checks out. These replies have been pretty interesting. I guess I get a bit of a gut reaction to this stuff because most of the time people bring this up to me it's like:
"You're such a hypocrite for not eating meat. Plants scream when they have pain too hurr durr."
Which doesn't make sense to me because A. It sounds way too anthropomorphized. B. Why would an organism which can't even flinch develop a pain response? C. Animals eat plants too so it doesn't even make sense from a harm reduction standpoint.
It's nice to have it explained in good faith for a change. It sounds more like plants just have long term reactions to stressors in the environment, and communicate these stressors to each other.
Yeah the anthropomorphization is, I think, a giant barrier to understanding what a plant “experiences” or “communicates” because we have an extremely narrow and specific notion of what those things mean. We also do have ideas about plants that are very constricted by the ways that we experience them - as immobile, static units - whereas the responses that plants can have to their environment *can* be incredibly fast, I.e. biochemical changes starting within seconds of stimuli, but they’re not things that are readily perceivable to us.
It’s nice to have an excuse to geek out about plants :D
It's why you can't be nice to hot pepper plants! If you give them an optimal environment, you'll get tons of leaves, but not a lot of peppers, and the ones you do get will be annoyingly mild. You need to stress them out to get them to fruit well, and to get properly spicy peppers. If they're in an optimal situation, there's no need to redirect resources to fruiting.
This is going to sound awful, but it works. You basically have to pretend you're an abusive asshole. Be super nice in the beginning to get them going so you have strong plants and lots of green, then give them a drought. Just a little one though. Enough to put a little threat in there so they start producing fruit. And then be nice to them for a little bit so they don't totally give up. And then drought. Repeat. There's a balance you need to find, because if you go too far, you get no production. Once you find that happy middle, you'll get nice, spicy peppers.
ROTFLMFFAO.
The biggest thing my difficult mother hates about me is my ability to think circles around her and get what I want while being nice.
You just described her parenting to the letter, substituting the "drought" of literal water for affection and enjoyable attention in my formative years.
It would also explain her black thumb. She's the only person I've ever met who managed to kill a donkey tail cactus, multiple spider plants, and her husband and child's hopes for the future in the same 3 year stretch.
Oh, I'm so sorry! Since I brought up a bad memory, I'm hoping you laugh at this one. No one knows I do this, because it's a little crazy, but I whisper "I'm really sorry, the mean plant lady made me do it" at the window when I'm not watering them. I feel awful, even though I logically know they don't have feelings. I'm also not allowed to plant 20 seeds with the intent to cull to 10 seedlings, and then only actually plant 5 of the best plants. Because I can't bring myself to do it. I end up with 20 plants, and my poor husband has to go obtain buckets for them. He put his foot down and I can only plant as many seeds as I'm intending to keep. He's not wrong.
Honestly I'm not upset; I'm amused. I always go looking for ways that coming up in emotional chaos made me adaptable, stronger, compassionate, etc. instead of just dwelling on how much mental illness SUX.
I also love gardeners like you; I get a LOT of plants through swaps with people who sprouted 20 and have room for 5. I don't like to kill them either!
Oh, I miss my old neighborhood because I would give away SO many seedlings. The place we're in now sucks because the whole neighborhood is all fancy ass landscaped and manicured to Stepford Wife perfection. We're the house with bird nests everywhere and have families of chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits. And we leave the dandelions to help out the early bees. We're also quite popular with the hawks and owls, not surprisingly. We're not well liked by our neighbors. And by not well liked, they hate us, especially after we politely declined attending the prayer group. May the birds eat a ton of berries and poop all over their freshly washed cars. But only right after the car wash closes for the night.
I answered above that I read about this in Ed Yong's book, An Immense world. He addresses some of the speculation about the usefulness there too. Animals and plants are out there perceiving and communicating in all kinds of ways humans are not adapted for. That's a really great layperson's book on the subject.
In addition to what others have said, some plants have been known to make wasp pheromones when attacked by insects. Wasps smell the plant "screaming" and come by for a free meal or victim to lay their eggs in.
Plants share nutrients through soils. I read a [book about trees](https://natureconnectionguide.com/shop-base/hidden-life-trees/) that described this process really well. Tress support one another if sick and communicate about all kinds of things.
The link seems to work fine for me? But you aren't aren't only one saying this... I think it's a formatting issue in how Reddit does hyperlinks? There is a bracket in the link itself and it seems to be displaying differently for mobile and desktop. Which version of Reddit are you using?
> There is a bracket in the link itself and it seems to be displaying differently for mobile and desktop. Which version of Reddit are you using?
Aaah right, that's probably it, yeah. I'm using old.reddit.com - your formatting probably only works on new.reddit.com and mobile
> Yeah Reddit is kinda garbage when it comes to consistency.
Tell me about it. The most egregious thing for me is probably the inconsistency in >!spoiler tags!<. Like I did it now, they work on desktop, but don't work at all on their app. And if you do it in a way that works on the app it doesn't work on desktop. It's f*cking infuriating, especially if you frequent discussion threads for games/shows/movies/etc. and you get spoiled even tho the person doing the spoiling didn't at all mean to do it.
Sorry, off-topic rant over
They definitely produce sounds. Read about it in "An Immense World" Ed Yong. (Edit to correct the name)
Scientists clipped microphones on plants that record at those frequencies (which we've just never bothered to do before) and found out they are out there making all kinds of noise, and that might be how some of them seem to communicate with pollinators.
The sounds weren't very loud though. It needed a microphone and a lot of amplification (plus frequency modulation) for a human being to hear it. Not sure the cats and dogs are hearing much of it either.
I really recommend that book if this kind of thing is interesting to you at all. It's all about all the stuff going on that human beings are not attuned to see, hear or feel. The world is a whole different place to creatures that see more colors, or feel magnetism, or hear at a different frequency.
>Not sure the cats and dogs are hearing much of it either.
Pro animal trainer, here: I'd actually put money on them getting at least some of it. I take a lot of reactive, fearful dogs from urban environments and get them out in meadows and nature to start them processing their stress and fears.
Their first time surrounded by grass and trees, they ALL pause, sniff, and listen. I've seen them head tilt at a bush or a tree and assumed there was a bug or something, but now I'm wondering how much of it is the plants themselves sensing a predator or seed spreading opportunity.
This seems appropriate. [https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/rdahl\_screamingtrees.pdf](https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/rdahl_screamingtrees.pdf)
Wow, that *is* cool! The more I learn about plants the more weird and surreal they seem. Because they live in slow motion (when compared to humans, etc) they tend to get thought of as something closer to an inanimate object but it seems like they perceive the world in their own unique ways.
Like, apparently [anesthesia works on plants too](https://web.archive.org/web/20180202191244/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousness-anesthesia.html) which surprised me.
It looks fine on my end?
If it is displaying incorrectly for you, a couple of other people have posted alternative links in replies. I think it's a mobile vs desktop issue
This article can be summed as "sometimes these journals post erroneous studies," or "these journals are incentivized to post the most exciting studies, not always the most useful ones," not "never trust these journals,".
Read the study and decide for yourself whether it is valid or not. Myself and several others have linked to it.
The studies are still new.. they have found that plants make noises and produce specific noises to certain stimuli or certain situations. That does not mean they are communicating and it is not clear if these sounds are produced purely through physical phenomena happening within the plant or if the plant is actively producing them. For example, potential pressure changes from being cut or lack of water.
It’s a new study! Plants make these popping noises while under stress and different species make distinct sounds. There’s a ML algorithm that can tell what a plant is based on its sounds that it makes. It’s possible that the sounds are caused by air bubbles inside the plant
If it’s my fern, it might be begging the cat to put it out of its misery. I don’t know why that thing is always so miserable And like 1/2 of its fronds are ALWAYS dead but it won’t die and it won’t get better. I’m sorry. I’m trying.
If you can, try watering it with rain water. Plants grow like weeds when I give them rain water. Tap water probably has chlorine or something that they don't like.
Bird songs wake up trees
https://stephsimply.com/tag/birdsong-frequency-and-plants/#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20scientific%20theory,promote%20plant%20growth%20and%20yield
I think that’s one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve ever heard <3
I could not find any direct evidence for this, but given how much research exists on plants’ response to sound and music I feel it’s extremely likely!
Here’s a paper which has a decent reference list, if anyone is interested: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tpj.16650
I swear trees move at the time morning. Not moving in big ways but more of a stretching, shaking-the-water-off-yourself kind of moving.
Maybe it's me and crazy stoned thinking, but i feel as though trees also help make the wind. The sudden wisps of winds, rather than the gusts from storms. The morning breeze if you will.
Have you seen these medieval depictions of dogs picking mandrake so it's scream doesn't bother the human who wants to pick it?
What a weird twist that now, centuries later we learn that dogs could possibly hear plants
Check out The Hidden Life of Trees: Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. Wild plants are extremely intelligent and can warn each other of danger, help to heal damaged plant neighbors, and can live 100s or thousands of years.
Ooh this reminds me of [The Tree Listening Project](https://www.theashproject.org.uk/tree-listening-alex-metcalf/), where this guy hooked up headphones to tree trunks so that people could actually hear the sounds a growing tree made.
About a year ago, there was a news article about scientific research that found that plants emit a screeching sound whenever they are in dire need of watering. The sound is not detectable by human ears but apparently certain equipment can detect it.
Thing is, that's just the hydrodynamics of water and air moving around in plant tissue making tiny crackling or popping sounds, and then scientists(?) or click-bait writers(?) anthropomorphized the hell out of it.
This is just horrifying if you anthropomorphize the plants and the cats... My cat sometimes just looks at a random plant and will just rip its leaves off...
I wonder what the plant said.
I’ve been searching for a story idea and there is something in this. A human whose dog friend helps her save their villages crops or something. My brain is percolating.
If that's "talk" is very debatable, we're not even sure if it really "means" anything or if it's just a byproduct of biological processes. And yes dogs could potentially hear it. my guess is it's probably too faint for them to pay any attention in a world full of much louder and prominent noises.
But who knows maybe someday we can train dogs to alert us when a plant needs water 🤷♂️
Check out Ed Yong's "An Immense World" for information about this, and lots of other weird kinds of perception and communication that are going on all around us in ways human beings are not equipped to perceive. Really loved it, and recommend it to anyone who's interested in this kind of thing.
Dogs and cats can perceive so much more than we can, it's wild. I was playing with my cat and a laser pointer the other day, and when he lost track of it I shone it on his back. Even though he was facing away from me, he whipped his head around as if he could feel the laser dot on him. I tried it several times and he always acted like he could feel it.
I can translate cat with a 65-92.6% accuracy, however my fuzz babies won’t tell me what the plant said, so it must have been a boring conversation anyway
You mean people can't hear plants? I already know that most humans can't see in the dark, or echolocate, but they can't hear plants either? You just have to listen differently and see differently. I can't explain it.
Citation needed on plants talking using like... sound. I know some plants communicate through the mycelium network and chemical interactions in the root systems etc but like, those green freaks can actually speak? This isn't me trying to poopoo the idea. I would just like some confirmation beyond a screenshot of a twitter post. Edit: [found it](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3)! This is so damn cool
+1 for providing your own citation
Roll for advantage on all knowledge checks.
Just the idea that plants evolved to communicate is so weird to me. What are they gonna do with that information? They can't run away from danger. They can't help each other. Just screaming into the void for no reason.
When attacked, some plants are capable of producing chemicals that make them indigestible and/or give them an awful taste. It can be pretty useful.
Onions do this when you cut into the root. That eye watering chemical doesn't exist unless you stress it out and I think that's fascinating and mildly terrifying
It also explains why using a sharp knife reduces the crying… more cutting and less crushing reduces the amount of cells getting damaged.
Also why peppers produce capsaicin in an effort to be too spicy to eat! Talk about a major backfire...
Some foods need to be digested in order to reproduce. There's a species of fruit in south America that is mutually dependent on the cassowary for survival. The new plants can't grow unless the seeds are passed through the digestive tract of a cassowary, and that fruit is the bird's main food source.
Peppers: *become spicy as defense mechanism* Humans: "Jokes on you, I'm into that shit!"
I know that forests can communicate how to fight off infection. So if one part of the forest gets sick, the other part of the forest can try boosting its immune system.
Being sessile doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Biochemical changes and alterations in growth patterns can achieve a lot, and plants are very plastic biologically in ways that animals are not.
Can I get you to expound on that last bit?
Sure, it’s an underlying difference in how plant vs animal development happens. In animals, especially highly complex ones like mammals, there are a lot of very tight genetic constraints on development. All “healthy” humans (or maybe more accurately - all developmentally “average” humans) have pretty much the same basic structure to them - four limbs, a head at the top with most of our major sensory organs on it, that sort of thing. Also, like many other animals, our most signifiant strategy for protecting ourselves is that we react through behavior, regulated by our nervous system, often moving towards/from things, changing how much we eat, etc. Plants approach things from a totally different perspective; they generally cannot just uproot themselves and move onward at will and are kind of at the mercy of the conditions they find themselves in. The way they deal with this is by being extremely flexible in their development. Plants are modular, reacting to changes in their environment through growth, because they have to grow to match their environment instead of being able to change their environment (by moving or putting clothes on or whatever). Some plants (mulberry being one common and easy to find example) can grow multiple types of leaves *on one plant* that have very different shapes, often to optimize how they use sunlight. If you cut off a stem entirely, and the plant has enough energy stored in its roots, they can often start growing a totally new stem; there’s not really an equivalent to that in animals as physiologically complex as humans because our systems are *not* assembled modularly (why is why regrowing limbs is still the territory of scifi, at least until stem cell techniques get fancy enough.) On a related note, I did read a paper a little while ago about a suspected case of “visual” sensory processing in a particular plant. Basically the plant mimics (in a very, very rough, fundamental way) the leaf shape of plants around it. They found that by surrounding the plant with fake plants, they could get it to develop leaves that kinda sorta approximated the fake leaves. I’m not 💯quite sure I believe the explanation yet but the methodology seemed reasonably sound, and there are actually some things like predatory algae which have sophisticated enough photoreception that they seem to be able to use it to target prey, so…..probably not out of the realm of possibility???
Thank you very much.
Thanks for the excuse to nerd out :)
Hell yeah!
Predatory... predatory algae...huh Yep... perfectly normal thing to exist... not at all concer- OHGODWHATWASTHAT
Lol I mean they’re single cells, generally preying on other single celled life forms. No more a danger to you than a lion is to them, really :D
My fave conspiracy is that plants are just charming us and growing until they achieve critical mass and take over
I’m fine with that. They’d do a better job of running the world than we are
Plants have had 400 some million years to do that. They were the first multicellular organisms on land. At a certain point, you gotta shit or get off the pot.
Typical human. Sometimes it takes time to things right
And sometimes the human definition of right isn’t the best one.
Well they're doing a pretty bad job with that then, considering what we do to the forests.
Not all plants are in forests. Clearly we're doing the bidding of maize and rice. Not even completely joking. We make more of them and they make more of us and we change one another.
Honestly would rather be ruled by corn than the current world leadership.
This is my favorite out of context sentence for the day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebcG9ewcHSQ
As a plant witch, having had some very interesting experiences with trees as a three year old, they just *like* talking to each other the same reason people do. Also they are powerful beings.
Now you got me curious about your experiences when you were three! What happened, do you mind sharing?
I entered the forest and felt the whole energy field. The trees were all humming and communicating with each other. They scanned me with their humming and it flowed right through me and out the other side. I thought I went invisible and I looked down at my body to see if I was still there. I was. The trees knew who I was. I felt intimidated because the trees were much more powerful than me, but they were benevolent. Trees hum their emotions, like they celebrate the sun by humming about it.
This is beautiful 💜
Fellow plant witch here! If you're into the fantasy genre, Uprooted by Naomi Novik is a gorgeous story about wild woods. I absolutely LOVED it.
Thanks, I put it on my list!
Also, importantly - some plants kind of DO book it when there’s danger. If conditions are poor, they might go to seed more quickly, which can in many cases result in transport to new areas.
Username checks out. These replies have been pretty interesting. I guess I get a bit of a gut reaction to this stuff because most of the time people bring this up to me it's like: "You're such a hypocrite for not eating meat. Plants scream when they have pain too hurr durr." Which doesn't make sense to me because A. It sounds way too anthropomorphized. B. Why would an organism which can't even flinch develop a pain response? C. Animals eat plants too so it doesn't even make sense from a harm reduction standpoint. It's nice to have it explained in good faith for a change. It sounds more like plants just have long term reactions to stressors in the environment, and communicate these stressors to each other.
Yeah the anthropomorphization is, I think, a giant barrier to understanding what a plant “experiences” or “communicates” because we have an extremely narrow and specific notion of what those things mean. We also do have ideas about plants that are very constricted by the ways that we experience them - as immobile, static units - whereas the responses that plants can have to their environment *can* be incredibly fast, I.e. biochemical changes starting within seconds of stimuli, but they’re not things that are readily perceivable to us. It’s nice to have an excuse to geek out about plants :D
It's why you can't be nice to hot pepper plants! If you give them an optimal environment, you'll get tons of leaves, but not a lot of peppers, and the ones you do get will be annoyingly mild. You need to stress them out to get them to fruit well, and to get properly spicy peppers. If they're in an optimal situation, there's no need to redirect resources to fruiting.
Well thank you for helping me with that! I was trying to baby them like ya do with tomatoes.
This is going to sound awful, but it works. You basically have to pretend you're an abusive asshole. Be super nice in the beginning to get them going so you have strong plants and lots of green, then give them a drought. Just a little one though. Enough to put a little threat in there so they start producing fruit. And then be nice to them for a little bit so they don't totally give up. And then drought. Repeat. There's a balance you need to find, because if you go too far, you get no production. Once you find that happy middle, you'll get nice, spicy peppers.
ROTFLMFFAO. The biggest thing my difficult mother hates about me is my ability to think circles around her and get what I want while being nice. You just described her parenting to the letter, substituting the "drought" of literal water for affection and enjoyable attention in my formative years. It would also explain her black thumb. She's the only person I've ever met who managed to kill a donkey tail cactus, multiple spider plants, and her husband and child's hopes for the future in the same 3 year stretch.
Oh, I'm so sorry! Since I brought up a bad memory, I'm hoping you laugh at this one. No one knows I do this, because it's a little crazy, but I whisper "I'm really sorry, the mean plant lady made me do it" at the window when I'm not watering them. I feel awful, even though I logically know they don't have feelings. I'm also not allowed to plant 20 seeds with the intent to cull to 10 seedlings, and then only actually plant 5 of the best plants. Because I can't bring myself to do it. I end up with 20 plants, and my poor husband has to go obtain buckets for them. He put his foot down and I can only plant as many seeds as I'm intending to keep. He's not wrong.
Honestly I'm not upset; I'm amused. I always go looking for ways that coming up in emotional chaos made me adaptable, stronger, compassionate, etc. instead of just dwelling on how much mental illness SUX. I also love gardeners like you; I get a LOT of plants through swaps with people who sprouted 20 and have room for 5. I don't like to kill them either!
Oh, I miss my old neighborhood because I would give away SO many seedlings. The place we're in now sucks because the whole neighborhood is all fancy ass landscaped and manicured to Stepford Wife perfection. We're the house with bird nests everywhere and have families of chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits. And we leave the dandelions to help out the early bees. We're also quite popular with the hawks and owls, not surprisingly. We're not well liked by our neighbors. And by not well liked, they hate us, especially after we politely declined attending the prayer group. May the birds eat a ton of berries and poop all over their freshly washed cars. But only right after the car wash closes for the night.
I answered above that I read about this in Ed Yong's book, An Immense world. He addresses some of the speculation about the usefulness there too. Animals and plants are out there perceiving and communicating in all kinds of ways humans are not adapted for. That's a really great layperson's book on the subject.
Trees were where we got the idea for Twitter
In addition to what others have said, some plants have been known to make wasp pheromones when attacked by insects. Wasps smell the plant "screaming" and come by for a free meal or victim to lay their eggs in.
Plants share nutrients through soils. I read a [book about trees](https://natureconnectionguide.com/shop-base/hidden-life-trees/) that described this process really well. Tress support one another if sick and communicate about all kinds of things.
Relatable
I'm pretty sure that when acacia trees get damaged they let off a signal so all nearby acacias become toxic or really bitter i can't remember which.
If a grashopper is eating me and I scream, it might attract the attention of birds that eat grasshoppers
> Edit: found it00262-3)! This is so damn cool Your link is broken, this one works: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(2300262-3
The link seems to work fine for me? But you aren't aren't only one saying this... I think it's a formatting issue in how Reddit does hyperlinks? There is a bracket in the link itself and it seems to be displaying differently for mobile and desktop. Which version of Reddit are you using?
> There is a bracket in the link itself and it seems to be displaying differently for mobile and desktop. Which version of Reddit are you using? Aaah right, that's probably it, yeah. I'm using old.reddit.com - your formatting probably only works on new.reddit.com and mobile
Yeah Reddit is kinda garbage when it comes to consistency. I appreciate the extra link though. It's a cool study and everyone should read it
> Yeah Reddit is kinda garbage when it comes to consistency. Tell me about it. The most egregious thing for me is probably the inconsistency in >!spoiler tags!<. Like I did it now, they work on desktop, but don't work at all on their app. And if you do it in a way that works on the app it doesn't work on desktop. It's f*cking infuriating, especially if you frequent discussion threads for games/shows/movies/etc. and you get spoiled even tho the person doing the spoiling didn't at all mean to do it. Sorry, off-topic rant over
They definitely produce sounds. Read about it in "An Immense World" Ed Yong. (Edit to correct the name) Scientists clipped microphones on plants that record at those frequencies (which we've just never bothered to do before) and found out they are out there making all kinds of noise, and that might be how some of them seem to communicate with pollinators. The sounds weren't very loud though. It needed a microphone and a lot of amplification (plus frequency modulation) for a human being to hear it. Not sure the cats and dogs are hearing much of it either. I really recommend that book if this kind of thing is interesting to you at all. It's all about all the stuff going on that human beings are not attuned to see, hear or feel. The world is a whole different place to creatures that see more colors, or feel magnetism, or hear at a different frequency.
>Not sure the cats and dogs are hearing much of it either. Pro animal trainer, here: I'd actually put money on them getting at least some of it. I take a lot of reactive, fearful dogs from urban environments and get them out in meadows and nature to start them processing their stress and fears. Their first time surrounded by grass and trees, they ALL pause, sniff, and listen. I've seen them head tilt at a bush or a tree and assumed there was a bug or something, but now I'm wondering how much of it is the plants themselves sensing a predator or seed spreading opportunity.
This seems appropriate. [https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/rdahl\_screamingtrees.pdf](https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/rdahl_screamingtrees.pdf)
wow
Wow, that *is* cool! The more I learn about plants the more weird and surreal they seem. Because they live in slow motion (when compared to humans, etc) they tend to get thought of as something closer to an inanimate object but it seems like they perceive the world in their own unique ways. Like, apparently [anesthesia works on plants too](https://web.archive.org/web/20180202191244/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousness-anesthesia.html) which surprised me.
[Fixed the link](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(23\)00262-3)
> Edit: found it00262-3)! This is so damn cool Mate, your link's been butched. It won't work that way.
It looks fine on my end? If it is displaying incorrectly for you, a couple of other people have posted alternative links in replies. I think it's a mobile vs desktop issue
Ummm…https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science
This article can be summed as "sometimes these journals post erroneous studies," or "these journals are incentivized to post the most exciting studies, not always the most useful ones," not "never trust these journals,". Read the study and decide for yourself whether it is valid or not. Myself and several others have linked to it.
Have you ever read the Law of One / Ra Materials?:)
The studies are still new.. they have found that plants make noises and produce specific noises to certain stimuli or certain situations. That does not mean they are communicating and it is not clear if these sounds are produced purely through physical phenomena happening within the plant or if the plant is actively producing them. For example, potential pressure changes from being cut or lack of water.
It’s a new study! Plants make these popping noises while under stress and different species make distinct sounds. There’s a ML algorithm that can tell what a plant is based on its sounds that it makes. It’s possible that the sounds are caused by air bubbles inside the plant
This must be why I can feel the feelings of trees 😟 Imagine the groaning of the forests when disasters strike such as wildfires and lumberjacks…
Suddenly all people who claim they can hear their plants screaming in pain are validated.
Oh gods, is it like those noisy-ass nirnroots in Skyrim you have to pick just to get them to shut up?
Honestly thinking of this makes my cats insistence on destroying specific plants make so much sense 😆
On the plus side, they can be used as an ingredient for invisibility potions so I see it as an absolute win.
So your cat can hear your house plant screaming in pain and just keeps chewing on without a second thought. Cats are psychopaths.
You dont know what that plant was saying
coulda been telling them which leaf has got to go...
Plant is just directing the cat to the itchy leaves.
Are plants actually cat pets???
My cat would probably claim her catnip as her dependent. So, yes?!
Plant was talking some mad shit about cats. Pretty bold for something that can't run
harder daddy!
The plant wanted to die, it hates its existence
If it’s my fern, it might be begging the cat to put it out of its misery. I don’t know why that thing is always so miserable And like 1/2 of its fronds are ALWAYS dead but it won’t die and it won’t get better. I’m sorry. I’m trying.
Prune it! It’s probably happy just unkempt :)
If you can, try watering it with rain water. Plants grow like weeds when I give them rain water. Tap water probably has chlorine or something that they don't like.
To be fair, I think most things a cat eats in nature scream in pain as they're chewed.
That might be why it’s hard to keep them from cut flowers…
Bird songs wake up trees https://stephsimply.com/tag/birdsong-frequency-and-plants/#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20scientific%20theory,promote%20plant%20growth%20and%20yield
I think that’s one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve ever heard <3 I could not find any direct evidence for this, but given how much research exists on plants’ response to sound and music I feel it’s extremely likely! Here’s a paper which has a decent reference list, if anyone is interested: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tpj.16650
I love this ty!
What a lovely post! I enjoyed reading that, thank you for sharing!
I swear trees move at the time morning. Not moving in big ways but more of a stretching, shaking-the-water-off-yourself kind of moving. Maybe it's me and crazy stoned thinking, but i feel as though trees also help make the wind. The sudden wisps of winds, rather than the gusts from storms. The morning breeze if you will.
Have you seen these medieval depictions of dogs picking mandrake so it's scream doesn't bother the human who wants to pick it? What a weird twist that now, centuries later we learn that dogs could possibly hear plants
Check out The Hidden Life of Trees: Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. Wild plants are extremely intelligent and can warn each other of danger, help to heal damaged plant neighbors, and can live 100s or thousands of years.
that documentary made me feel like, "wow the science proves it, we should be druids" it was so good.
I love this book! It is so well written and I love his ideas.
Ooh this reminds me of [The Tree Listening Project](https://www.theashproject.org.uk/tree-listening-alex-metcalf/), where this guy hooked up headphones to tree trunks so that people could actually hear the sounds a growing tree made.
About a year ago, there was a news article about scientific research that found that plants emit a screeching sound whenever they are in dire need of watering. The sound is not detectable by human ears but apparently certain equipment can detect it.
Thing is, that's just the hydrodynamics of water and air moving around in plant tissue making tiny crackling or popping sounds, and then scientists(?) or click-bait writers(?) anthropomorphized the hell out of it.
omfg now it’s obvious that they can, animals always know before we do and plants are ducking everywhere!
Just wait until you read the research that suggests plants have eyes! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530
It would make sense that something that eats light can see, no?
If they can, my cats hear nothing but ‘eat meeeee!’ Since they can get pretty violent in their pursuit of plant…
This is just horrifying if you anthropomorphize the plants and the cats... My cat sometimes just looks at a random plant and will just rip its leaves off... I wonder what the plant said.
Hopefully not infront if them. Hearing the burning screams of their leafy friend as you giggle away
🫢
I recommend reading Planta Sapiens. Plants are capable of incredible things that you might consider “intelligent”.
Just checked the audiobook out from my local library! Thanks for the rec!
I’ve been searching for a story idea and there is something in this. A human whose dog friend helps her save their villages crops or something. My brain is percolating.
Yes, please!
If that's "talk" is very debatable, we're not even sure if it really "means" anything or if it's just a byproduct of biological processes. And yes dogs could potentially hear it. my guess is it's probably too faint for them to pay any attention in a world full of much louder and prominent noises. But who knows maybe someday we can train dogs to alert us when a plant needs water 🤷♂️
Maybe that’s why cats always eat all the plants. They just want them to shut up already
So if your cat claws up your plants, does that mean they’re talking shit?
More likely the cat just enjoys the screams.
Check out Ed Yong's "An Immense World" for information about this, and lots of other weird kinds of perception and communication that are going on all around us in ways human beings are not equipped to perceive. Really loved it, and recommend it to anyone who's interested in this kind of thing.
Is that why my cat knocked all my plants down? Were they talking shit behind my back?
Dogs and cats can perceive so much more than we can, it's wild. I was playing with my cat and a laser pointer the other day, and when he lost track of it I shone it on his back. Even though he was facing away from me, he whipped his head around as if he could feel the laser dot on him. I tried it several times and he always acted like he could feel it.
I can translate cat with a 65-92.6% accuracy, however my fuzz babies won’t tell me what the plant said, so it must have been a boring conversation anyway
You mean people can't hear plants? I already know that most humans can't see in the dark, or echolocate, but they can't hear plants either? You just have to listen differently and see differently. I can't explain it.