My phone also screams (signals) when someone calls, must mean my phone feels pain I guess.
By contrast, stressed plants are much noisier, emitting an average up to around 40 clicks per hour depending on the species. And plants deprived of water have a noticeable sound profile. They start clicking more before they show visible signs of dehydrating, escalating as the plant grows more parched, before subsiding as the plant withers away.
someone smarter than me should get to inventing a device that listens to plant clicks and tells you when it needs water
That's actually mentioned as one possible use case further down the article!
Might be a good use-case to have your home irrigation system be triggered by plant clicks instead of a schedule.
Hasn't this study been done before? Feel like I've heard of grass "distress signals" from years back
Remember that Mythbusters (Episode 61 Deadly Straw) that re-created Cleve Backster's primary perception experiments to show plants can sense malicious intent and totally re-created his results? I had to re-watch it to make sure I was remembering correctly. They totally just alter the experiment until they break it, then sweep it under the rug and call it busted. Totally.
So it's been years since I've seen it, but I do remember that episode. I went through the wiki a bit and read up on some of Backster's experiments and how they were received by the scientific community... not great. It is a very intriguing subject, but I think it gets anthropomorphized pretty bad. Even the title here, "plants do scream" almost implies consciousness. I do think there are mechanisms that plants may have evolved that we don't fully understand. Like holding onto water or nutrients if there are more plant clicks (screams) happening nearby. But we have to be scientific about this. In the article, they talk about possible sources of the clicks possibly being air bubbles escaping the plant. Jumping to some of the conclusions that were explored in the past like "plants have ESP" are tall claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claims like that were never reproducible, so we shouldn't believe them. I think plants are amazing, and we should keep studying stuff like this, but best to stay realistic and phrase these findings appropriately. Just my two cents.
For me the question is if plants can actually hear these distress sounds, otherwise it’s not really for communication.
They probably do. But even if not, it can be used for communication with insects and other animals.
Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies.
Another "science" community with clickbaity bullshit.
Eh... What? It's an interesting article. The screaming is in quotation marks. So as far as I'm concerned, the title is fine.
Vegans: .. uh.. now what?
What? The fact that plants physically react to being cut has absolutely no bearing on whether they have conscious experience.
If you think pigs, chickens and cows have the same level of awareness and perception as broccoli, tomatoes or potatoes than you're the potato.
Humans have to eat and with the exception of a few minerals like salt, everything edible to humans is alive on some level. Vegansisn is making an ethical choice about reducing what causes the most pain fear and suffering in another. If I were to develop cancer, a tape worm or a virus should I also allow those living things to thrive as well or does "Uh, now what?" also apply to antibiotics?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you'd be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
Nah, the pops and clicks are just plant language for, "I give my consent to be your food. Namaste."
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2024-11-11